narrative: facility - adrian march Who: Adrian March What: Narrative Where: The facility When: After calling the cops
There were quiet places at the heart of the facility, where sound didn't travel, and no one worked. A building that housed so many extraordinary individuals couldn't be without quiet places, where those who might be a threat to themselves or others might go to be safe, and evaluated, and behind a door with a lock.
The hospital said he could see Patrick in 24 hours, if Patrick was willing to see him. That gave Adrian plenty of time to talk reasonably with one of his superiors, and be guided by a member of the staff to one of those quiet hallways with a line of faceless doors.
He didn't like coming back here. He never came back here willingly. He liked his lab, but he never ventured into the deeper hallways of the facility. They turned his stomach, a feeling he ascribed to the fear he'd always had of incarceration. In school, that blind terror of being a prisoner had sent him running from the scene of the crime, leaving Newt to take the blame.
He could think about it dispassionately now, since he'd been given a hefty dose of sedatives. They made him relaxed but not drowsy, and they made it very easy for him to detach without completely leaving his own body. They made it so he could walk through the door of one of the back rooms, though his step did hesitate, even under a heavy weight of narcotics to blunt the fear.
It was just for a day, and he had asked to come here - no one had made him come. Even so, he didn't feel safe until he was on the bed at the back of the room, covered in the thin comforter on the narrow bed, listening to the door lock click closed.
Without thinking, he glanced around to see where the light in the room was coming from. No windows, though, or channels to the outside. Just a low and soothing halogen lightbulb.
There were cameras in the room. Of course there were cameras. He wasn't naive. He knew anything he did in here would be recorded, that he would be evaluated, that someone would come talk to him at his station in a few weeks, when he'd had time to settle back into a routine. None of that felt like anything. It was someone else's problem, a future version of himself who might or might not exist.
The sedative had taken the twisting discomfort, that neverending burn of hate, the thick guilt and the despair, and condensed it down to a dull ember. He was too tired and separated from his thoughts to think about what he'd done, or what he was to whom. He curled up under the blanket, and he looked at his hand.
Blackness drifted from his palm, a thread, an expanding curl of smoke. It glimmered, sometimes with a thread of blue white light like a lightning bolt, sometimes with a spark of red as deep as a burning charcoal. The door to this room had no window, but no window was necessary. Somewhere, someone was watching this slip of darkness wind around itself, looping into a shred, then a shroud. It drifted around the room and moved casually between shapes, from a ball of iridescent smoke to a fragment of matte black cloth.
He stayed on the bed, and when it had poured out of him - when there was nothing left of it inside him - he watched it moving around the room, aimless as a tumbleweed, curiously wending around the camera, but somehow dull. It floated without purpose, and now and again it burst with a flare of light as Adrian had some thought, as his eyes almost focused. He remembered. He might be frightening.
He stayed like that until he couldn't keep his eyes open anymore. As he drifted off, the blackness floated his way, thinned to a sheet, and settled across his body. It shrouded him like a loose blanket of woven smoke, wrapping his narrow form in black.