regained: day x
taken: day x
witnesses: character (audience; day x)/character (viewed; day x)

The world is insensate oblivion, until it's not.

You awaken from a state of drugged unconsciousness exhausted and aching, tasting a still-flowing nosebleed on your upper lip. Your face is pressed against carpet, prone limbs heavy with the lingering influence of a sedative, the smell of spent fire and ash growing stronger and stronger as reality steadily reasserts itself. After what feels like hours but is really only a few minutes, you manage to open one eye enough to look around. Trying to see, to know, to understand the surroundings that you've been brought to.

Plush covers, velvet drapes, a luxurious bed. All manner of elegant trappings and furnishings....all of it now torched into blackened remains. There's scorch marks on the walls and ceiling. Stupefied, your gaze slips over everything until finally coming to rest on the girl that's standing across the room. She's wearing a light dress that contrasts sharply with her watchful expression of suspicious hostility. Recognition and bitter understanding bleed into your waking thoughts, then. Sharpening them, strengthening them, drawing your mind further out of its doped sleep. Eleanor. The daughter of your enemy, the presence on the other end of the line that's been tapped into your soul.

You slowly ease yourself up into a kneeling position, moving with the wary caution of a cornered animal that knows the odds aren't stacked in its favor, and remain silent once upright without so much as edging closer to the young woman. You only sit, and wait, and watch Eleanor with a mixture of suspicion, weariness........and expectation. You've already grasped the situation; it's not yet clear whether she has, too.

The chemical fingers that had invaded your mind, violated it, hadn't quite managed to overload your brain into simply popping like a sick gray balloon, nor wipe your psyche clean of all sanity and identity. Perhaps the splicing you were forced to undertake had attributed to that resistance? Well, the specifics didn't really matter. Not anymore. The job was done; an empathy bond binds the two of you together now, a permanent and inviolate leash.

She meets your look with a cold stare. The silence stretches. You wait for her to break it first.

After some time, she does, her voice a hostile demand.

"What do you want?"

The tight lines of your body ease a fraction — not a lowering of your guard, but a resignation to the current situation. "Me? Nothing." Your voice is quiet and calm, but your eyes remain wary and alert, untouched by that soft composure. "Slaves know better than to want anything." Feigning a disregard to your own words, you turn your attention to your nosebleed, reaching up to first thumb away the stream and then pinch your nostrils shut to stop the flow. "Well, the preferred term is 'assistant'....but regardless, this is about what the Flock wants. More specifically, what your mother wants." You return to watching her closely, remaining stationary.

"But you knew that already."

It's not a question. Eleanor Lamb was many things, but "stupid" was not one of them. Only Sophia Lamb could be responsible for this latest twist in her daughter's life.

Her eyes narrow, masking confusion and surprise. "Is that right?" She exhales, a bitter smile curving over her lips. "How funny. Mother with her speeches and dreams of utopia, and here she thinks to gift me with a slave. I'm touched." Eleanor's voice is low, dangerously soft. "I hope she isn't expecting to see you back in her service. Except in pieces, perhaps."

This time, the cold cruelty in her smile reaches all the way up to her eyes.

Edited 2015-06-18 06:21 pm (UTC)

Yet that menacing promise of cruel violence, impossibly enough, makes you smile in return. Intensely bitter and darkly amused, it's not a sweet expression by any means. It's easy to see through to the heart of Eleanor's suspicions: spy? Well, yes. That too. And yet you incline your head in a small nod, readily accepting the threat with ease. You had expected no less. Neither, it was certain, had Sophia.

"Ah, but a gift is supposed to be a desirable something-or-other that's offered with kind intentions. None of that applies to me. Isn't that so, Master?"

Part of you is wounded deeply when addressing Eleanor as such,. When you take that first crucial step toward cementing a dynamic of steep power imbalance into place. The rest of you is too coldly pragmatic to be much concerned, and proceeds to (slowly, gradually) roll up your sleeves to check whether the injection sites on your wrists have healed yet. For now, you study the skin there instead of Eleanor.

"Honestly, that's part of the reason why I'm here. Rather than set your bedding afire, your mother would prefer that you and I make good use of each other. Or something like that, I suppose — I wasn't in much shape at the time to properly listen. ....She probably is, though, is bound to be doing so right now."

You look up just to glance around in a bored sort of way, as if idly expecting to spot a microphone jutting out of the walls. You wonder if Sophia will have Words for you when the time came for you to report back, but you don't much care. The time when you wanted her approval more than anything is long since over.

"Incidentally, my name is Mamiya. But I doubt you care about that, so I'll answer to any name you bother to give me."

There's only acid bitterness in your eyes when you regard her despite the calm acceptance of that humiliation, and Eleanor in turn gives you a long, measuring look of cold neutrality, one you meet and hold.

"No, I don't think so. I'm tired of playing along with her little games." She turns away, her voice quietening. "So go back to where you came from, Mamiya. I don't want to see your face again."

You continue to watch her when she turns away, right up until that tired edge creeps into her voice. It's that subtle note which gives you pause, makes you shift focus back down to your wrists where the marks of forced splicing still remain. Behind the caution and bitterness that surrounds you like a protective cloak, her rejection is considered to be perfectly natural.

"....Sorry, but I can't." And you do sound (and feel) genuinely apologetic, although without any expectation of being believed. You know better than that. Who could trust anyone in this kind of situation? You would act no different in her shoes. "Even if there was a place for me to return to, they won't let me leave your side. Mm, except to tell them what they want to hear about your condition." You let out a humorless chuckle that dies quickly as you get to your feet.

"Especially not after all the work it took them to force you into my head and me into your own."

Eleanor's head comes up at those last words, an expression flickering across her face almost too fast to identify. Then fury is radiating down the bond she shares with you, white-hot and seething, before the connection is abruptly blocked. That surge of infuriated emotion through the link that neither of you wanted is the only warning you get and comes far too late to be of any use.

Between one breath and the next, Eleanor disappears and rematerializes across the room with a bang of displaced air, slamming you up against the wall with bone-bruising force, fingers around your throat. Holding you up with ease, flush with power, stronger by far. You struggle: writhing and thrashing against her iron grip, half-strangled snarls of defiance spilling out into the air still thick with the smell of burnt cinders. Something full of bloodlust and black joy comes crawling out in the bright gleam of her eyes.

"I can sense your ADAM. Not much, but it’s there."

Her voice is soft and amused, as if this was play and nothing else.

"Mother took away my toys, so I might just have to settle for ripping out your throat instead. All their hard work, gone to waste. What a shame that will be."

Kill you. She's going to kill you. Yet you force yourself to go still. To block out the pain, remove yourself from the dizzying sensation of too much adrenaline, stare down at Eleanor. Meeting that crazed, dangerous, euphoric expression with eyes narrowed almost to slits from agony. The corners of your mouth quirk into a weak grin.

"L...Less than you were expecting, huh? Your mother had me spliced. Never touched a implant before."

Before. A single word to neatly encompass all that has either been lost, or forcibly taken away. You struggle to keep speaking. If these are to be your last words, you mean to have them.

"Hhh....I'd rather not be killed just so you can spite her. We both know that she would just send in another one of me. She'd crack open your mind as many times as she had to. We're all resources to her......she wouldn't think twice." A derisive snort that unfolds into a choked, empty laugh. You aren't trying to convince her to spare you, after all. "But it's not like I can blame you. Only a puppet wouldn't lash out when it's been violated."

You touch the arm that ends in fingers curled tight around your throat, but gently. No strength in the gesture, no gathering charge of an implant. You smile down at her sadly, pained and expectant. Are you afraid to die? Yes, part of you clamors — but another part simply wonders why death has been withheld from you for so long. You never had the right to live after your parents had drowned. Perhaps having your throat torn out is simply karma for that one unforgivable sin.

Heat builds in Eleanor's palm, pale flame flickering over her knuckles. The fire that is her fury made real inches closer to the pale, delicate skin of your throat, flames licking the underside of your clenched jaw. Burning you, raising blisters, cultivating scars.

You don't break eye contact. Looking death in the face, resigning yourself to a slow and agonizing end.

Mother, Father.....when I see you again, if I apologize, will you forgive me? I—

And then she drops you like so much trash, turning on her heel and stalking across to the other side of the room. That bleak thought is snapped in two with a gurgle both surprised and pained as you hit the ground for the first time in conscious memory and the second in actuality. You watch her stomp away without a sound, without moving, relief and disappointment each weighing heavy in your chest like a disease.

You notice that her hands are shaking, that she balls them up into fists until the trembling stops.

✿ content
● After being drugged at some point, he was tossed inside of Eleanor's "room" (really a gilded prison, once she set afire) to make introductions.
● His clothes are a mess, ripped and stained, and physically he feels terrible.
● Confirmation that he had been spliced against his will, his DNA altered to give him powers (called "implants") that would otherwise be unobtainable.

— Once someone is spliced, they have ADAM inside them, how much depending on how heavily they've been spliced.

● He was bonded to Eleanor to act as a leash, as another tool for Sophia to use against her daughter..

— Also as a spy, but he doesn't treat the idea with any gravity. He doesn't believe Eleanor will ever reveal exploitable vulnerabilities to him.

● He gave his name, but it's missing.
● After he explains why he's here and what's been done to them, Eleanor lashes out, pinning him against the wall by his throat and nearly burning him alive.

— She abruptly stops for no readily understandable reason, before significant damage can be done.

● He both wants and doesn't want to die, survival instincts conflicting with survivor's guilt.
● There's feelings of hatred for Eleanor by the end of the memory, yet they're tempered by pity and some measure of understanding.

— He can't bring himself to blame her for her rage and spite, but she still tried to kill him on the basis of those feelings above all else.
— Also, her bloodlust and apparent cruel joy at the thought of killing him is something he finds to be very disturbing.

● Strikeouts indicated missing/blurred information.