Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction ❯ Perfection ❯ Chapter 18 ( Chapter 18 )
[ X - Adult: No readers under 18. Contains Graphic Adult Themes/Extreme violence. ]
By: Todesengel_ 
You have my attention Dr. Briefs.
Anime/Manga: Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Hentai / Horror / Psychological | Type: Yaoi | Uploaded On: 01.16.2007 | Pages: 4 | Words: 3.5K | Visits: 354 | Status: Completed
You have my attention Dr. Briefs.
Anime/Manga: Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Hentai / Horror / Psychological | Type: Yaoi | Uploaded On: 01.16.2007 | Pages: 4 | Words: 3.5K | Visits: 354 | Status: Completed
"So now you'll see," He smiled, his face pulled so wickedly by malice and shadows I figured immediately he'd somehow replaced our identical faces with someone else's. No, there was no possible way I could physically will mine to look so satanic. "now you'll know yourself better than ever. You truly believed, in your everlasting naivety, that I was the embodiment of the worse thing you could ever become. But you haven't even SEEN evil. You thought me decapitating that old bastard in the forest was the extent of my horrors? You're fucking crazy."
He stood, staring down from eyes that COULDN'T have been mine, making the table shake. But it wasn't HIM that made the surface quiver and I glanced in shock that my own fingertips on the table quaked so rapidly that even the ground beneath me was trembling with the force. Was I so afraid of what he would do or the fact that I'd have to realize, circumstantially, what I could do?"
"You're going to feel exactly what I have felt for years," He seethed, voice raspy as he shot the words out of tight vocal cords. "You want to understand me? Isn't that what you've been meaning to do from all this? To see," He cocked his head to the side, mock innocence and sweetness lacing his features. "to know the man you might become in a 'worse case scenario'?"
He threw a chair into the wall, both nearly shattering with the force.
"Well now you're going to get your chance. You're going to feel everything I have felt since I watched them die. You're going to know my wrath at what you've stolen from me. And the worst thing I can give you, you'll beg for more of."
I fell backwards into my chair, quivering like a fucking dog as he moved uncomfortably close into my face.
"You're going to fucking love me," He promised. "You're going to fucking love me as much as you ever loved him."
With that, he reached into his pocket, pulling out a strange device. No sooner had my eyebrows clenched in confusion than pain, so great it knocked me unconscious, pulverized my whole system.
I awoke, writhing in agony, every nerve ending screaming with torture, needing no conscious consent from me. I screamed. God, I screamed. I felt my windpipe gradually being damaged with the force, my cries going silent eventually as my body could will me no more air. The worst scream, I figured at that moment, was the silent scream from pain that cannot even be voiced.
I stared in terror at my kneecaps, blown into gory, pulpy matter, bone chunks and blood smeared from my pant-legs to my face. My body flailed up and down from the torment, my mouth contorted into a cry that wouldn't come out.
I just wanted to die. Just die. Just fucking go SOMEWHERE this pain didn't exist. Uhhh dragon...? Is it too late to resend that wish? Maybe wording it "just anywhere, NOW" would have been a better idea in the first place.
Somewhere in the torture, I felt his presence over mine, his smiling face a foggy blur.
"I knew you were stronger," He was laughing. God damn skid-mark sociopath. "I knew if it eventually came down to raw, brutal power, I'd stand a kickboxing kangaroo's chance at beating you. But I'm smarter, don't you get that by now?"
He hoisted me up by the front of my shirt, glaring into my pain-constricted face.
"I blew out your kneecaps the first time, installing a pair of control-activated bombs (generously constructed by Dr. Briefs himself) into your legs. Or did you think he was there for no reason?" He cocked his head to the side. "I knew one day you'd need to be humbled, brought to your 'knees' ironically enough. I just didn't realize how ingenious that little quirk would prove to be."
He slapped my face, that small pain never even registering on my sky-high scale.
"Or do you really think I just go around blowing out people's kneecaps for a hobby?"
I threw my head back, my skull on the verge of cracking as I pounded it against the concrete, begging it to render me unconscious.
"Y---YES!" I ground out through gritted teeth.
His face went serious, a cool, cruel mask of indifference.
"You're God damn fucking right I do."
He landed a kick to my chin, kneeling down suddenly and grabbing my bloodied face.
"I'm gonna give you a wonderful gift Goku," He said sweetly, batting his eyelashes. "You want SOOO much to 'embrace' your 'enslaved' people; to 'grasp' their tormented existence. Well trust me, when I'm finished, you'll understand to a very real extent JUST how limited my mercy can be. I'm going to show you true evil and you're going to love me for it."
The rest of this ordeal cannot be truly rewritten to form. It's hard to describe so I'm going to throw to the winds "extensive vocabulary" and just use simple words. I can't really tell you what happened from then on. Or at least for that period of time. I was drugged and I was beaten. I know that. That's pretty fucking simple to decipher. But to what extent, I can't really recall. I think, in the ways of our grand creator, shock is an awesome gift. My mind won't will me to remember what he did to me, and for the life of the rest of me, I don't dare ask it to.
I'm glad to forget and I thank whatever God chooses not to take a ripe one on me each day, that I continue to forget.
So instead of trying to get out my "well gee, I THINK this is what happened..." theory, I'll simply rewrite what I had originally, in those awful moments, written on the ground beneath me and the walls of my cell. A lot of it I'll have to roughly interpret, as real sentences and logical thought were a damn near impossibility in my drug induced madness. And a lot of it, I'm going to honestly tell you, I have no idea if it's true or not. I guess maybe I don't want to think it is, as sick and grisly the mental images come. And yeah, I'm gonna warn you right now, if you're weak of stomach or just don't "dig" the gory stuff, you're going to want to skip this part of my story.
But enough fucking suspense. This is what I wrote:
You put the poison in my veins again and I'm prone to thank you for it. You've given me this world, this euphoria of make-believe that sets us, again, apart from everything in the past. You smile with your immaculate face, promising you love me when you cut me. Blood trickles like tear drops and hot kisses, fucking me from behind while you dig the blade deeper.
You love me.
You love me.
And I think I love you.
One more jab with the needle, ah yes, there it is. I love you so much, my Vegeta, my God, my Kakarot. You hurt me because you feel the intensity don't you? You burn me with coals because they can tell me so much more than you can. Human words mock the existence of the fire between us.
You always hurt the ones you love. They just never understood it before me.
Your laughter makes me smile as you tell me what scientific machination is coursing through my blood stream, telling me that I just love you because you're making me do so. If only you knew, I scream until my throat bleeds because I want you so much.
I thought I'd loved before. I was so wrong.
You raped me with a knife today, making me suck on the barrel of a gun while you did it, driving the stiff, hard blade deep inside me as I coughed and choked in my agony. Then you released two bullets into my body, right down my throat. The metal still lingers, sweet reminders that you'll be back to dig them out later.
You promise me.
You promise me a thousand things.
I was buried alive, a pipe down in the hole with me, the only thing that kept me alive, long enough to breathe, long enough for you to listen to my maddened screams in the darkness. I could hear your laughing for three days while I begged to be let out, begged for food. On the fifth day, you tore me free, my mother, birthing me once more into the world as I was met with Roman's screaming form.
"The Princess sang and her voice was so beautiful that the dragon's evil powers were cut off and he fell to the ground dead. For nothing so evil could withstand the goodness of her voice."
I ate him alive and you watched me.
You kept laughing when you cut pieces of my skin off, dangling before my face as you told me that we were so alike; that you liked to see me on the inside as well as out. I think I smiled before I passed out, feeling you rub the maggots and worms into my wounds.
I awoke to my freshly healed flesh boiling with insects eating their way out.
The servants are complaining that I scream too much, calling me an abomination of life when you hung me by the skin of my neck and back on jagged pieces of metal for all the kingdom to see. They say you're a mad man but I think you're a genius.
Even when you call me horrible names, lighting me on fire and pissing on me to put out the flames.
The regen tank hates me. Or maybe I hate the regen tank. It takes me away from you yet you put me there so often. That's the worst kind of torture you know? I begin to heal and I begin to forget why I'm here in the first place. You think you're punishing me but you're just reminding me. Why I deserve this. Why I need this redemption, your means of absolving me before a world that hates me.
You make me see my family again. You make me see all the flaws that got me here.
That's why I hate the regen tanks so much. They remind me.
Vegeta once told me that a man is only so pure as his circumstances.
I don't know why I thought of that now. I think someday, I'll understand what he meant.
......................
I' m a little clearer today I think. I don't know. Maybe I'm crazier to be thinking I'm close to sanity. Who knows. Who cares.
Whatever he has me on today feels like crickets. Or no. No. More like ants or beetles, crawling through the tunnels of my veins, stretching the skin along my forearms. I think they might lay eggs eventually.
Oh. Ok, so I am still fucking crazy. That's a relief.
Dr. Briefs is here. I think he's talking. I don't know for sure. I think sometimes he is but mostly, I think he's just begging. Begging me to stop writing on these walls, begging me to listen to him. Here's a random thought; how the hell did I get these crayons? Oh yeah, Roman. Did you know, humans taste nothing like chicken? They say everything tastes a little bit like chicken. Nah. Humans..... humans taste more like pork.
Blah blah blah.... talking talking Dr. Briefs. Paging Dr. Briefs, Paging Dr. Briefs. Enter the terminal of 'Don't Give a Fuck'.
He's talking about perfection. God how weird. No wonder he's in here with me. We're both a couple of God damn lunatics.
"You've got to come to Goku!" He's saying. Paging cartoon hero Goku, paging cartoon hero Goku. Let me get my cape and red underwear. Say, I wonder if I'll get some sort of Captain Planet code ring in this universe?
"We need you to save us," He's saying. "You've gotta stop him!"
Sure. Uh huh. Just as soon as I manage to throw these underpants over my spandex.
"Stop writing what I say you lunatic."
Ha!
"Look Goku, there's something you need to understand," Ok. "Perfection isn't just an ideal..... "
Hm.
"It's a disease."
.............
You have my attention Dr. Briefs.
"Umm,...good I guess," Yep. "Perfection isn't just some idea he's trying to acquire. It's a virus, or in his mind, a cure. A cure for freedom of speech, freedom of opinion. A cure mostly, for free will. Killing their history isn't sufficient enough. History, known or unknown, repeats itself. He believes freewill was God's greatest mistake in creating humanity. Perfection takes it all away. It numbs the part of the brain that contains ambition, drive, anger." Good to know he's downplaying the big boy words. "An infected person cannot even feel irritation! Annoyance!" Awesome, guess I'm not infected huh? "They're fucking lifeless!"
He touched my shoulder.
"He doesn't understand Goku. Human life has no basis to withstand if it feels nothing. Happiness, sadness, anger, pain.... people MUST have these in order to live. It's what sustains REAL life." I'm going to be 8,000 fucking years old. "Eventually, when the drug has truly taken effect, there will be no reason for people to even get up in the morning, no reason to even fear death as a consequence."
Death hardly seems like any sort of consequence. Consolation prize maybe?
"Goku, not everyone goes to the rest homes," He whispers. "some, he puts in these cells. I know you hear them. I know you feel the wind change when they scream. They're guinea pigs, just like you." Guinea pigs at least get a water bottle and a wheel. "He's testing the drug in huge doses, testing its different effects at dangerous levels. Some of your days pass and you stare at the ceiling. You don't even want to move, your mind refuses to even process thought as you feel no reason to. It's a miracle your heart even decides to pump at the doses you've been given.
"You must stop him. He plans to unleash it upon the children of the world, waiting a few years until they grow, until they begin to calm, until there is no hint of aggravation or feeling. Then the uninfected will go to the rest homes and the world as he sees it will be exactly as he planned; Perfect."
Doesn't sound so bad.
"You'd think so. True, no one will have the desire to over-eat, to use drugs, to have sex without the purpose of procreation. Starvation will never be known, aids and other STDs will be a fairytale. Death will come only with age or whenever he chooses to set the work hour limits. But he doesn't get that there WON'T BE work. There won't BE fairytales. The world will be filled with zombies. Only these zombies don't thirst for brains or the living or whatever. They'd don't have any desire to leave the grave at all. He saw the drive for perfection in humans, the way that the fashion industry ruled the hearts of people, made them strive endlessly and ruthlessly for the perfect body, for the perfect faces, the perfect everythings. He saw the world fall to its knees to achieve the status of blonde, blue eyed, 5'5, C cup, size 1 pants. He saw people starve themselves and throw up in toilets and mutilate their bodies beneath scalpels to become the IMAGE of what they were TOLD was perfect. Why wouldn't he think that would enslave them? They willingly let it! But what HE fails to realize and what THEY failed to realize is that despite human stupidity and prejudice, the world THRIVES on diversity and variance!"
Where'd he go? I'm on the floor now. Cold cold floor, rough stone surface hurts my crayons.
Was he even here? I'm so crazy. I'm going to read this some day and I'm not even going to believe it. Crack-dreams.
Oh there she is. Angel. My angel. My pretty blue eyed angel. One side of her face like the ethereal painting someone died before finishing, the other side a Halloween mask. She's just sitting in front of me, watching my crayons wrasp across the ground. I don't even know if wrasp is a word. Such a dark cell, only the light beneath the door letting me see her.
I guess you understand me don't you? You're really the only one that does, my once-was-Bulma. In our agony, he sets us free. In our times of real competence, he makes us mad. We love him because he tortures us, because he makes us see that we deserve it. I think that's the worst feeling, don't you? Wanting to hate the person that lifted the bars? Wanting to kill the person that untied the clasp?
Your tiny fingertips, yellowed and rotted underneath, touch the wax from my old writing. Your clothes are stained with the seeping fluid that sometimes drips clumsily from that ugly tubing. We would have stopped a long long time ago huh? But he wills us to keep living, to keep remembering. He is God, you know.
For now though, it's just me and you. You once asked me to set you free. I say he frees us, but not from these bodies. I can't let you go. I know you beg it of me, everytime I see your eye, every time that small trace of you, Bulma, comes back. In those two seconds where I imagine real thought catches your mind and you're in so much horror at the world around you, you let yourself recede back into cozy madness.
You cried once. I know I heard you. Yeah, nod, you know you want to. You cried when you came into this cell the first time. I heard that weird, sucking, gurgling sound that was your intake of breath.
But for now, no tears, no gurgling. Just trace the floor with me. Just let me love you, this new you, just like I loved the old you. You're still beautiful to me. Man-made beautiful. Unconventional beautiful.
Just like he said, my world thrives on diversity.
I told you once, a long time ago, when we were just kids, that when I grew up, I was going to marry you. You seemed so much older than, so much larger than life than I was. But I think you said yes. I think you said it somewhere under your breath, before the wind took it away. And even when you'd gone, I'd watched the yellows and oranges and reds of the sky, and I'd promised myself, someday, I'd be all you ever needed, I'd give you everything you ever wanted.
But I can't let you go, can I? I can't set you free. Maybe you cried that day, when you first saw me here, because you realized, that as much as you're a caged, man-made thing, I'm married to you now, in all our everlasting agony.
Locked together in misery, my bride.
I'll love you till' death do us part.
He stood, staring down from eyes that COULDN'T have been mine, making the table shake. But it wasn't HIM that made the surface quiver and I glanced in shock that my own fingertips on the table quaked so rapidly that even the ground beneath me was trembling with the force. Was I so afraid of what he would do or the fact that I'd have to realize, circumstantially, what I could do?"
"You're going to feel exactly what I have felt for years," He seethed, voice raspy as he shot the words out of tight vocal cords. "You want to understand me? Isn't that what you've been meaning to do from all this? To see," He cocked his head to the side, mock innocence and sweetness lacing his features. "to know the man you might become in a 'worse case scenario'?"
He threw a chair into the wall, both nearly shattering with the force.
"Well now you're going to get your chance. You're going to feel everything I have felt since I watched them die. You're going to know my wrath at what you've stolen from me. And the worst thing I can give you, you'll beg for more of."
I fell backwards into my chair, quivering like a fucking dog as he moved uncomfortably close into my face.
"You're going to fucking love me," He promised. "You're going to fucking love me as much as you ever loved him."
With that, he reached into his pocket, pulling out a strange device. No sooner had my eyebrows clenched in confusion than pain, so great it knocked me unconscious, pulverized my whole system.
I awoke, writhing in agony, every nerve ending screaming with torture, needing no conscious consent from me. I screamed. God, I screamed. I felt my windpipe gradually being damaged with the force, my cries going silent eventually as my body could will me no more air. The worst scream, I figured at that moment, was the silent scream from pain that cannot even be voiced.
I stared in terror at my kneecaps, blown into gory, pulpy matter, bone chunks and blood smeared from my pant-legs to my face. My body flailed up and down from the torment, my mouth contorted into a cry that wouldn't come out.
I just wanted to die. Just die. Just fucking go SOMEWHERE this pain didn't exist. Uhhh dragon...? Is it too late to resend that wish? Maybe wording it "just anywhere, NOW" would have been a better idea in the first place.
Somewhere in the torture, I felt his presence over mine, his smiling face a foggy blur.
"I knew you were stronger," He was laughing. God damn skid-mark sociopath. "I knew if it eventually came down to raw, brutal power, I'd stand a kickboxing kangaroo's chance at beating you. But I'm smarter, don't you get that by now?"
He hoisted me up by the front of my shirt, glaring into my pain-constricted face.
"I blew out your kneecaps the first time, installing a pair of control-activated bombs (generously constructed by Dr. Briefs himself) into your legs. Or did you think he was there for no reason?" He cocked his head to the side. "I knew one day you'd need to be humbled, brought to your 'knees' ironically enough. I just didn't realize how ingenious that little quirk would prove to be."
He slapped my face, that small pain never even registering on my sky-high scale.
"Or do you really think I just go around blowing out people's kneecaps for a hobby?"
I threw my head back, my skull on the verge of cracking as I pounded it against the concrete, begging it to render me unconscious.
"Y---YES!" I ground out through gritted teeth.
His face went serious, a cool, cruel mask of indifference.
"You're God damn fucking right I do."
He landed a kick to my chin, kneeling down suddenly and grabbing my bloodied face.
"I'm gonna give you a wonderful gift Goku," He said sweetly, batting his eyelashes. "You want SOOO much to 'embrace' your 'enslaved' people; to 'grasp' their tormented existence. Well trust me, when I'm finished, you'll understand to a very real extent JUST how limited my mercy can be. I'm going to show you true evil and you're going to love me for it."
The rest of this ordeal cannot be truly rewritten to form. It's hard to describe so I'm going to throw to the winds "extensive vocabulary" and just use simple words. I can't really tell you what happened from then on. Or at least for that period of time. I was drugged and I was beaten. I know that. That's pretty fucking simple to decipher. But to what extent, I can't really recall. I think, in the ways of our grand creator, shock is an awesome gift. My mind won't will me to remember what he did to me, and for the life of the rest of me, I don't dare ask it to.
I'm glad to forget and I thank whatever God chooses not to take a ripe one on me each day, that I continue to forget.
So instead of trying to get out my "well gee, I THINK this is what happened..." theory, I'll simply rewrite what I had originally, in those awful moments, written on the ground beneath me and the walls of my cell. A lot of it I'll have to roughly interpret, as real sentences and logical thought were a damn near impossibility in my drug induced madness. And a lot of it, I'm going to honestly tell you, I have no idea if it's true or not. I guess maybe I don't want to think it is, as sick and grisly the mental images come. And yeah, I'm gonna warn you right now, if you're weak of stomach or just don't "dig" the gory stuff, you're going to want to skip this part of my story.
But enough fucking suspense. This is what I wrote:
You put the poison in my veins again and I'm prone to thank you for it. You've given me this world, this euphoria of make-believe that sets us, again, apart from everything in the past. You smile with your immaculate face, promising you love me when you cut me. Blood trickles like tear drops and hot kisses, fucking me from behind while you dig the blade deeper.
You love me.
You love me.
And I think I love you.
One more jab with the needle, ah yes, there it is. I love you so much, my Vegeta, my God, my Kakarot. You hurt me because you feel the intensity don't you? You burn me with coals because they can tell me so much more than you can. Human words mock the existence of the fire between us.
You always hurt the ones you love. They just never understood it before me.
Your laughter makes me smile as you tell me what scientific machination is coursing through my blood stream, telling me that I just love you because you're making me do so. If only you knew, I scream until my throat bleeds because I want you so much.
I thought I'd loved before. I was so wrong.
You raped me with a knife today, making me suck on the barrel of a gun while you did it, driving the stiff, hard blade deep inside me as I coughed and choked in my agony. Then you released two bullets into my body, right down my throat. The metal still lingers, sweet reminders that you'll be back to dig them out later.
You promise me.
You promise me a thousand things.
I was buried alive, a pipe down in the hole with me, the only thing that kept me alive, long enough to breathe, long enough for you to listen to my maddened screams in the darkness. I could hear your laughing for three days while I begged to be let out, begged for food. On the fifth day, you tore me free, my mother, birthing me once more into the world as I was met with Roman's screaming form.
"The Princess sang and her voice was so beautiful that the dragon's evil powers were cut off and he fell to the ground dead. For nothing so evil could withstand the goodness of her voice."
I ate him alive and you watched me.
You kept laughing when you cut pieces of my skin off, dangling before my face as you told me that we were so alike; that you liked to see me on the inside as well as out. I think I smiled before I passed out, feeling you rub the maggots and worms into my wounds.
I awoke to my freshly healed flesh boiling with insects eating their way out.
The servants are complaining that I scream too much, calling me an abomination of life when you hung me by the skin of my neck and back on jagged pieces of metal for all the kingdom to see. They say you're a mad man but I think you're a genius.
Even when you call me horrible names, lighting me on fire and pissing on me to put out the flames.
The regen tank hates me. Or maybe I hate the regen tank. It takes me away from you yet you put me there so often. That's the worst kind of torture you know? I begin to heal and I begin to forget why I'm here in the first place. You think you're punishing me but you're just reminding me. Why I deserve this. Why I need this redemption, your means of absolving me before a world that hates me.
You make me see my family again. You make me see all the flaws that got me here.
That's why I hate the regen tanks so much. They remind me.
Vegeta once told me that a man is only so pure as his circumstances.
I don't know why I thought of that now. I think someday, I'll understand what he meant.
......................
I' m a little clearer today I think. I don't know. Maybe I'm crazier to be thinking I'm close to sanity. Who knows. Who cares.
Whatever he has me on today feels like crickets. Or no. No. More like ants or beetles, crawling through the tunnels of my veins, stretching the skin along my forearms. I think they might lay eggs eventually.
Oh. Ok, so I am still fucking crazy. That's a relief.
Dr. Briefs is here. I think he's talking. I don't know for sure. I think sometimes he is but mostly, I think he's just begging. Begging me to stop writing on these walls, begging me to listen to him. Here's a random thought; how the hell did I get these crayons? Oh yeah, Roman. Did you know, humans taste nothing like chicken? They say everything tastes a little bit like chicken. Nah. Humans..... humans taste more like pork.
Blah blah blah.... talking talking Dr. Briefs. Paging Dr. Briefs, Paging Dr. Briefs. Enter the terminal of 'Don't Give a Fuck'.
He's talking about perfection. God how weird. No wonder he's in here with me. We're both a couple of God damn lunatics.
"You've got to come to Goku!" He's saying. Paging cartoon hero Goku, paging cartoon hero Goku. Let me get my cape and red underwear. Say, I wonder if I'll get some sort of Captain Planet code ring in this universe?
"We need you to save us," He's saying. "You've gotta stop him!"
Sure. Uh huh. Just as soon as I manage to throw these underpants over my spandex.
"Stop writing what I say you lunatic."
Ha!
"Look Goku, there's something you need to understand," Ok. "Perfection isn't just an ideal..... "
Hm.
"It's a disease."
.............
You have my attention Dr. Briefs.
"Umm,...good I guess," Yep. "Perfection isn't just some idea he's trying to acquire. It's a virus, or in his mind, a cure. A cure for freedom of speech, freedom of opinion. A cure mostly, for free will. Killing their history isn't sufficient enough. History, known or unknown, repeats itself. He believes freewill was God's greatest mistake in creating humanity. Perfection takes it all away. It numbs the part of the brain that contains ambition, drive, anger." Good to know he's downplaying the big boy words. "An infected person cannot even feel irritation! Annoyance!" Awesome, guess I'm not infected huh? "They're fucking lifeless!"
He touched my shoulder.
"He doesn't understand Goku. Human life has no basis to withstand if it feels nothing. Happiness, sadness, anger, pain.... people MUST have these in order to live. It's what sustains REAL life." I'm going to be 8,000 fucking years old. "Eventually, when the drug has truly taken effect, there will be no reason for people to even get up in the morning, no reason to even fear death as a consequence."
Death hardly seems like any sort of consequence. Consolation prize maybe?
"Goku, not everyone goes to the rest homes," He whispers. "some, he puts in these cells. I know you hear them. I know you feel the wind change when they scream. They're guinea pigs, just like you." Guinea pigs at least get a water bottle and a wheel. "He's testing the drug in huge doses, testing its different effects at dangerous levels. Some of your days pass and you stare at the ceiling. You don't even want to move, your mind refuses to even process thought as you feel no reason to. It's a miracle your heart even decides to pump at the doses you've been given.
"You must stop him. He plans to unleash it upon the children of the world, waiting a few years until they grow, until they begin to calm, until there is no hint of aggravation or feeling. Then the uninfected will go to the rest homes and the world as he sees it will be exactly as he planned; Perfect."
Doesn't sound so bad.
"You'd think so. True, no one will have the desire to over-eat, to use drugs, to have sex without the purpose of procreation. Starvation will never be known, aids and other STDs will be a fairytale. Death will come only with age or whenever he chooses to set the work hour limits. But he doesn't get that there WON'T BE work. There won't BE fairytales. The world will be filled with zombies. Only these zombies don't thirst for brains or the living or whatever. They'd don't have any desire to leave the grave at all. He saw the drive for perfection in humans, the way that the fashion industry ruled the hearts of people, made them strive endlessly and ruthlessly for the perfect body, for the perfect faces, the perfect everythings. He saw the world fall to its knees to achieve the status of blonde, blue eyed, 5'5, C cup, size 1 pants. He saw people starve themselves and throw up in toilets and mutilate their bodies beneath scalpels to become the IMAGE of what they were TOLD was perfect. Why wouldn't he think that would enslave them? They willingly let it! But what HE fails to realize and what THEY failed to realize is that despite human stupidity and prejudice, the world THRIVES on diversity and variance!"
Where'd he go? I'm on the floor now. Cold cold floor, rough stone surface hurts my crayons.
Was he even here? I'm so crazy. I'm going to read this some day and I'm not even going to believe it. Crack-dreams.
Oh there she is. Angel. My angel. My pretty blue eyed angel. One side of her face like the ethereal painting someone died before finishing, the other side a Halloween mask. She's just sitting in front of me, watching my crayons wrasp across the ground. I don't even know if wrasp is a word. Such a dark cell, only the light beneath the door letting me see her.
I guess you understand me don't you? You're really the only one that does, my once-was-Bulma. In our agony, he sets us free. In our times of real competence, he makes us mad. We love him because he tortures us, because he makes us see that we deserve it. I think that's the worst feeling, don't you? Wanting to hate the person that lifted the bars? Wanting to kill the person that untied the clasp?
Your tiny fingertips, yellowed and rotted underneath, touch the wax from my old writing. Your clothes are stained with the seeping fluid that sometimes drips clumsily from that ugly tubing. We would have stopped a long long time ago huh? But he wills us to keep living, to keep remembering. He is God, you know.
For now though, it's just me and you. You once asked me to set you free. I say he frees us, but not from these bodies. I can't let you go. I know you beg it of me, everytime I see your eye, every time that small trace of you, Bulma, comes back. In those two seconds where I imagine real thought catches your mind and you're in so much horror at the world around you, you let yourself recede back into cozy madness.
You cried once. I know I heard you. Yeah, nod, you know you want to. You cried when you came into this cell the first time. I heard that weird, sucking, gurgling sound that was your intake of breath.
But for now, no tears, no gurgling. Just trace the floor with me. Just let me love you, this new you, just like I loved the old you. You're still beautiful to me. Man-made beautiful. Unconventional beautiful.
Just like he said, my world thrives on diversity.
I told you once, a long time ago, when we were just kids, that when I grew up, I was going to marry you. You seemed so much older than, so much larger than life than I was. But I think you said yes. I think you said it somewhere under your breath, before the wind took it away. And even when you'd gone, I'd watched the yellows and oranges and reds of the sky, and I'd promised myself, someday, I'd be all you ever needed, I'd give you everything you ever wanted.
But I can't let you go, can I? I can't set you free. Maybe you cried that day, when you first saw me here, because you realized, that as much as you're a caged, man-made thing, I'm married to you now, in all our everlasting agony.
Locked together in misery, my bride.
I'll love you till' death do us part.