Fabricated Chapter 22

[companionwolf]

It’s dusk as Davey drives the van along the bumpy dirt roads that leads to the main building in the ‘rehabilitation campus’. They park and unload Alex and their luggage (a single bag; the rules for stay are pretty tight), Espeon and Alice making PC promise to come back and check in to assure them things are going ok. 

PC blinks. Here is a two story building, dark wooden roof tiles and white outside paneling. A sign on the front reads ‘Welcome Center’, with a porch out front and a map on a sign on one end. 

He walks with Alex up the wooden steps of the porch into a white tiled lobby. Davey and Tulip tail them, taking seats on the couches in near the reception desk, the latter putting her feet up on the coffee table and knocking off the magazines. 

The receptionist looks up from her computer, and blinks at PC and Alex. She glances at her screen, and then a look of understanding comes over her. 

“You must be the one we got a email about,” she says as she stands up and comes out. She shakes Alex’s hand, and the kid looks down at their shoes, mumbling a hello back. 

“Yeah,” says PC, “they’re here for the, uh, treatment stay.”

The woman looks over Alex’s shoulder at him, and squints. “Are you sure they’re the one in need of it?” 

“I’m sorry?”

She shakes her head. “Nothing,” she says. “Give me a moment and we’ll get you all set up.” 

The receptionist disappears back behind her desk through a door. PC looks at Alex, and gives them a encouraging look. “It’ll be alright,” he says. “Probably normal rehabilitative things.”  

Alex shuffles awkwardly, mumbling something he can’t hear. He goes to ask them to repeat themselves, but the doors behind the receptionist desk fly open, and a bustle of people in blue scrubs, headed by the receptionist, come rushing out and around PC and Alex. There’s shouting, something about ‘severe case’ and ‘immediate procedures’, and in the rush someone grabs him by the arm and drags him off away from the others.

He struggles; the grip tightens.

“Hey! You’ve got the wrong—“

“We know exactly what we’re doing,” says the person who’s got his arm. PC is pulled down the hall, and then pushed into a dark room. The person flips on the overhead light to reveal a operating table, and pauses.

“You’re not going to cooperate, are you?” they say, and sigh behind their surgical mask. 

“Uh, no?”

“Mm,” they say as the door opens again, and their hand goes into their pocket for a moment. A few seconds later, a gaggle of more operators come in and PC is overwhelmed by a force of hands and arms who strip him of his clothes - there is  no hesitation when his true form is revealed, only rough hands grabbing at him to bring up him onto the table, where he’s strapped down. 

Once he’s secure, a few of the people shed their scrubs to reveal long sleeved luxurious purple and silver clothes, masks still on and then accompanied by hoods drawn over their heads, and hurry out of the room. He shouts after them, and then at the people checking the bed straps, but no one responds to him. 

PC shifts against the bonds, squinting as the main operator, the one with the crooked mask who brought him here, brings the surgical light to hang over him. 

A rolling cart is brought in; on it, a number of precision devices, all for cutting flesh. Awakening instinct kicks in his mid— occasional repair by scissors is generally accepted, but not like this. 

“What are you doing?” PC asks, and then yelps in horror as a tool is dragged across his middle, splitting the fabric and spilling out stuffing. Astral limbs jump back to life, only to disappear again at the pressure of the bonds. He stares, mute in pain, as the main operator prods his stuffing and peels back the fabric hole to look inside. 

The main operator grunts and begins to pull out handfuls of PC’s stuffing; the others around them are whispering, things like ‘burn it out’ and ‘show it your gift’ and other things that PC can’t really parse through the haze of ache. 

He feels the Ethereal shift against his being, asking what’s going on. He can barely answer. 

They’re looking for something, I think.

The Ethereal hums. They are all psionic, it says.

Oh. That’s... worrisome. 

The last word is half indistinguishable and turns into muddled feeling of terror and pain at the end as another cut is made, along a seam this time (just under the ribbon), causing more stuffing to fall to the floor. PC can feel his consciousness splitting, gets flickers of viewpoints from the floor up at the bodies of the humans surrounding him, of fingers grasping and releasing into a pile. 

Can I help? asks the Ethereal.

I don’t know, he thinks and the words are scarcely formed. I don’t know. I think they’re going to kill me.

PC feels a shudder through his self, and then the Ethereal is hanging above him, above the table and the humans, glimmering green red and absolutely howling. The humans scatter to sides of the room at the appearance, the main operator jumping and dropping his tool to point up at the ghostly figure.

“Is that what the Great Revered Emissary prophesied...?” the main operator says, their voice barely a whisper behind their mask. 

The other doctors, crouched against the walls, murmur quiet hymn like noises, or perhaps they speak amongst themselves; PC isn’t sure, isn’t sure of anything besides the pain that muted him and dulls everything except the former to a sharp constant. PC screws his eyes shut. 

Time must pass, or he must pass out, more the latter, for when he opens his eyes again, he is somewhere else. PC blinks wearily in the lowlight, at the rough wooden walls and tin roof, and is not sure. 

He feels the swift movement of a sewing needle, and glances down; it is a girl in a light purple dress, with long white hair and eyes glimmering red-purple. She is sewing up the cut along his side, one hand clutching stuffing and tucking it back inside of him as she goes.

It hurts still, it burns, even her work does, but as she sews first the side seam closed and then the cut across his ‘stomach’, the pain lessens, and then dulls to throbbing. 

PC sits up best he can. The girl puts down her tools and, somewhat shyly, offers him the clothes that had been thrown to the floor. He wills his limbs to existence, dresses, gently touches the now stitched ‘wounds’ with trembling fingers.

“Thank you,” he says finally.

The girl is quiet. Awakening blazes as she gazes at him, and him back: she is young, and she has helped him, and so it is known he must do the same for her. It aches like the wounds do now, aches like the missing of his beholden does. 

“Not sure what they were doing,” he continues, somewhat thickly through the shake that still grasps his voice in its fear coated hands. “Just glad they didn’t get any further...”

PC rubs his side with one hand, plays his fingers about his stomach with the other. The girl blinks hair out of her eyes. 

“My name’s Pillow Central,” he says to her, because she has seen his natural self, and she is a child, and they can be trusted with true names.

“My name’s Sam,” says the girl. “Page Sam.”

“Wish I could say it’s nice to meet you, but...” He shrugs, inhales and exhales slowly, tries to get the spots out of his eyes, tries to breathe. “You, uh, you do good needle work.”

“Dame Maria teaches us the work,” she says.

“Dame?” PC asks. “Your family uses titles?”

She nods. “Everyone has a place,” she says. Her eyes get squinty. “Even outsiders. Even Ethereals.” 

He blinks. “You know what a Ethereal is?”

“Everyone calls you that,” she says. “They’re trying to keep it down, but Knight Keith told the Matriarchs, and my sister who’s in training overhead, and—“

“How long has it been?” he asks, mostly to himself. He needs to get out of this room. Needs to find his friends. He begins to get up, but Sam shoves him back into the corner, furiously shaking her head.

“They’re looking for you,” she says, “and you do not want to be found.” 

“My friends...” 

PC tries to explain, wills himself to, but the words trail off into a exhausted half sputtering. She frowns at him.

“You must also rest,” she says. 

He mumbles something about that being a human thing, and she rolls her eyes. “Psionics are a human thing,” she says, “a blessed gift from those coming, but you have it too.”

He could explain, but the world is spinning again, and he slumps deeper into the corner. He could explain, but there are pulses of darkness at the edges of his vision, that threaten to swallow him up. 

So he, somewhat incoherently, concedes her that point. She stands and disappears out of the swinging gate, and for a moment he is able to glance across the dirt hall, is able to connect this with things he’s seen and understand this is some kind of stable, before she returns carrying a large blanket which she drapes over him. 

“I’ll be back later,” she says. “I have go now. To classes. They’ll wonder where I’ve been.”

PC weakly waves her on, letting himself fully slide along the stable wall and lay there as she leaves, listening to the buzz of the flies and the soft breaths of the animals housed with him. 

The quiet does not ease his nerves, only exacerbates it, and he finds that he is asking Awakening once again ‘protect them, protect them, protect them.’ Less a prayer, and more a begging.

He sinks into sleep finally, the hymns of desperation still echoing in his mind.

(Protect them. Protect them. Protect them.)