Who: Tatum & Sebastian. When: After the gassing. Where: Their enclosure. What: Sullen ginger is not a warm roommate. Warnings: TBA.
When she was unconscious, at least, there had been the blissfulness of being completely unaware. It was the only escape that she had, and it was fleeting. She'd been knocked out by the gas like everyone else, but she hadn't been able to sleep since waking up from that experience. Every time that she closed her eyes, she saw blood; elongated tentacles driving through Emma, the look on her girlfriend's face when their eyes met for just the quickest second before she'd been dragged into the ceiling. It had been fleeting eye-contact, even more fleeting than her getting any rest was now, but Tatum couldn't forget it. Nothing would wash it away.
She couldn't erase the presence of the memory in her mind, no matter how much she wanted to. It wasn't how she wanted to remember Emma, when there were so many things they'd done and so many better things to think about, but it was the memory that kept assaulting her against her will.
Really, she'd been hoping that perhaps the gas had been lethal. She knew it hadn't been, once she awoken of course, but hours ago during the chaos when she had only vaguely recognized the sulfur smell in the air, she decided in her last seconds to breathe even deeper, taking it all in. She'd taken in enough to knock her out cold for a time, long enough for their captors to do something to make her feel a little less exhausted and worn down (her stomach hurt now but upon waking up it hadn't ached from hunger quite like it had before), but not enough to kill her. Not enough to escape from her fate.
She was too weak-willed to kill herself any other way. If the gas had been poisoned, that would have been easy. It wasn't like they had much in their enclosures to use for instruments of suicide, anyway. It was like a prison, they didn't have much of anything to hurt themselves with, because their captors obviously didn't want them dead.
She had never gotten up the guts to try to run into the incubation chamber after Emma, which was exactly what she should have done, if she really wanted wanted to die alongside her. That had been her chance, a clear moment of fuck-up on the security on the other end. Specimens, presumably, were not something to be wasted so lightly. They didn't want to kill them, Tatum reasoned, otherwise they would all be dead already. All of them. Emma and the other two had been accidental, she felt almost certain of that now. She could have joined them, a problem that slipped into the system, easily eliminated. But she had just laid on the ground like a baby, sobbing and crying, and now she had to keep playing their game, alone.
What was she meant to do to end it, suffocate herself in the creepy bedding pile? Try to jump from the tallest branch of the tree and hope that she broke her neck on the impact of the fall? She was too cowardly for the uncertain. She wasn't even housed with Marcus anymore, whom she'd been growing fond of, or at least accustomed to, before the walls had come down. Marcus could have killed her, if she asked very nicely. Maybe he wouldn't have done it, but she could have asked. He had such big, strong hands. He could have choked her out in no time, ended it all for her. But she didn't even have him anymore, just the skinny awkward man that had been hovering over her after Emma had died, the one that had promised not to touch her.
He'd made good on his promise so far, but she didn't like the way he kept glancing at her, the way he seemed to expect her to talk to him. She might have, a few days ago, but she didn't feel much like talking anymore. She was polite enough, one word answers, but even less of a chatterbox than ever before. Tatum's time since waking up after the gas had been spent holding up the same western wall that she had been sitting against in her old cell.
Occasionally, she would curl into a ball, but even then she would not sleep. Mostly she sat up, legs pulled up, knees around them protectively, staring off at anything except her cellmate, or other cellmates getting intimate. She didn't want to see that now anymore than she had wanted to see it before. The slight discomfort of feeling like a voyeur as she peered in on people had been replaced entirely by pure disgust at what she saw them doing.
She got up to drink occasionally, when she couldn't stand the dryness of her throat any longer, but she never once ate, or even reached for the food tube. Not even when hunger tugged painfully at her would she reach for the sludge offered to them.
Wherever Marcus was now, she still believed in what they had discovered so early in time trapped together. Water was good, but she didn't trust the food. She didn't want to eat their food, or more specifically, whatever they were putting in their food. If the food had been poisoned, that would have been easier than the idea of swallowing whatever drug cocktail might be in the disgusting slop. She would have eaten poison, but not that stuff, not knowing what it might do to her, how she might react. What it might make her do.
Starving would be a slow death, but it would probably be better than facing an unknown amount of time trapped in the walls of the giant hive that housed them all again. Starvation would get her eventually, mercifully, but she didn't know exactly when. Marcus had said people could go a lot longer without food than they could without water. Maybe she needed to stop drinking, as well. In the meantime, whatever the case, her stomach hurt. But it was easy to ignore, easy to tune herself out, easy to stay curled up against her wall and stare out of it wordlessly. Blinking, but keeping her eyes closed as little as possible, alert despite all of her discomfort.