Kurt’s head pounded, face pressed against the concrete. His wrists stung where the cuffs had chafed against his fur, where they had been bound behind his back. He allowed himself a whimper as his twisted shoulders strained, slowly lifting himself up from the ground.
He sat up on his haunches and let his eyes open, just slightly; just enough to check that there was no one in the hall past the doors of his cell, no humans there to see him move. To make sure there was no witness to his eyes, his face, his teeth, all the things that made him so different from them. Kurt didn’t want to see them. Seeing them meant studies, more scientists, more scars stabbed into his skin.
That was all Kurt was good for here. He was good for staying in his cage, for staying alive, for producing more samples, for being a freak, for being a monster.
No, he thought, and shook his head. That was Norris talking. He was not a monster. He was a boy, a fine young man, his mother had said. She told him to never forget that.
Sometimes, her words were hard to remember. It was easier to think of memories, of moments, of how her wrinkled hands felt against the fuzz of his own. Sometimes she’d held his hand in prayer, other times simply because she wanted to. He missed her, missed her touch, missed her smile and her warmth and the safety of her arms.
Kurt laid his left hand over his right. He squeezed his eyes shut, hoping that, just for a moment, he could pretend that it was her hand holding his.
His eyes flared open. It wasn't the same. It could never be the same. His mother had five fingers, thin and slender, wrinkled yet calloused from years of work. Kurt glanced down to his lap. His fingers were thicker than any normal human’s could ever be, three on each hand, soft and covered in fuzz, ending in dark, stubby claws.
He dug the claws into the meat of his hand, just deep enough to ground him. Kurt knew he wasn’t like the others in the facility. The others were useful, interesting beyond the way they looked. The people here would keep him alive only as long as there was something new to be learned, some new information they had yet to pry from his bones.
Kurt shivered, and pressed himself against a dank wall. It was so cold here. He still remembered the look in his mother’s eyes when she told him he was going to go somewhere new, somewhere safer than the circus. She told him stories of how much fun it would be, to live in a place for mutants, where they would be trained to harness their powers for the greater good.
She couldn’t have known.
Kurt released his hand, ignoring the dents his claws had left, and shook his head, vehemently. It was still foggy from whatever they had given him, yet he still took the opportunity to glance around the dark, enclosed space. He was in a cell, that was nothing out of the ordinary. But this was a new cell, one that he had never seen before. They must have moved him. He drank in the novelty of it, the scent of a different strain of madness and mold.
He peered around the room, running a clawed fingertip over the cracks and whispers in the concrete. He traced them throughout the room, noting where tiny chunks were missing, where the cracks escaped the confines of the floor and climbed up the walls like old vines.
A noise gave him pause, and Kurt strained his ears for the sound of the guards, the now-familiar rap tap tap of steel-toed boots echoing against concrete.
He sat up at attention, gaze downwards. The guards didn’t like it when Kurt looked at them. That was one of the first lessons he had learned here. Keep your eyes down. The first day he was here, the guards stopped and scowled, taking a few moments to look down at him in disgust.
They had called his eyes pissholes, yanked his head away so they wouldn’t have to see them. Those same eyes, his mother had called honey-bright, ‘sweet as he was,’ she’d said.
The guards didn’t like seeing his eyes. As the noise grew closer, Kurt kept his head down, and watched as the steel-toed boots passed him, clanking away.
When the echoes had finally faded down the hall, he raised his gaze up towards the ceiling. Mold lined the edges of spider webbing cracks, and a faint drip-drip emanated from the corner. It puddled on the ground, and Kurt allowed himself a slight smile. Running water? Upgrade.
He sat, and followed the damp trickle back up the wall, found the cranny it dripped from. That was connected to another crack, which led back down and across, leading to… something new. A rectangle of metal, slats cut into it, twisted horizontally. He had seen this before, somewhere. What was the word for it?
A vent. It was in the circus headquarters, the only building that never changed spots, no matter how far the circus had traveled. It had been a day’s ride to the building, and he remembered asking his mother what all of these new things were. He was still curious, back then. The men who had prodded him to stand up straight, had grabbed his chin to tilt his head around, they had said they were simply, “curious.”
Kurt had been afraid of those men, and from how tightly his mother had gripped his hand, he guessed that she was, too.
Days later, when he woke up caged, tied and bound, he could see why.
Further down, a shriek echoed through the halls, and Kurt resisted the urge to go and look through the iron bars. That person must be new here. Soon they’d learn that screams only ever made it worse. He gritted his teeth, and pressed himself into the corner.
Another scream joined the first, and then another, until the sound of his breathing was drowned out by a chorus of pain. Kurt clapped his hands over his ears, curling his tail tight around him, squeezing his eyes shut. He bit his lip, terror coiling deep in his stomach. He could make out another sound, below the screams. His breath caught in his lungs. His hands began to tremble, as the line of screams grew closer and closer to his cell.
This couldn’t be happening- he hadn’t done anything wrong- There wasn’t any reason for them to give him the Shock, let alone the entire cell row. Kurt could feel his chest tighten.
His entire body was overwhelmed by fear, gripping his heart with cold fingers. They were coming with their nightsticks and cattle prods, and there was nowhere to run, and yet his mind didn’t care. This fear, it was beyond logic, beyond reason, beyond anything other than the desperate need to escape.
He needed to get out. He needed to get out before the screaming grew closer, the crackling sound grew stronger, and his throat swelled with unshed tears. In a moment of what can only be described as utter panic, Kurt dug his claws deep into the side of the vent.
Bolted. Welded. The vent was unyielding, yet that didn’t stop him from tearing at it like a crazed animal, as layers of his claws tore off and became embedded below the metal slats. He let out a choked, mangled sound, as he heard a shrill cry from the neighboring cell. Kurt’s eyes were wide, heart racing as he looked into the narrow space of the vents. If he could just get in there- he could fit, he smelled the faint scent of outside air and pine, he just had to get out-
Something tugged at his gut, and darkness surrounded him. Kurt’s eyes flew open, and his nose was immediately choked by the smell of rotting eggs. His nose wrinkled in distaste, eyes watering as they got used to the sight ahead of him. Kurt was in a long metal rectangle, so small that the tip of his head brushed the ceiling, even when he was on his hands and knees.
When did he stop standing?
Kurt’s claws scrabbled against the metal surface, crackling growing even louder behind him. If he hadn’t done something wrong before, he had now. Something had happened, pulled him away, into the vents, and within seconds, he heard a loud noise blaring, tone rising and falling like the tides. It hurt his ears. It hurt his mind. But it echoed throughout the facility, and he could see flashes of red from the slats behind him
They knew. The facility knew something had happened, that Kurt had gotten out, that something was wrong with him, and the memories lurking in the back of his head told him all he needed to know to get moving.
They won’t stop until they know everything.
His mother had told him a story, about a man and his golden goose. These men would cut him open to figure out what had happened, and the worst part was, he knew it wouldn’t stop there. They would cut apart the golden goose like they were carving it up for dinner, they would tear him to pieces just to stitch him back up again
The experiments, the tests, the cuts and the samples, they never stopped. It never had and it never would, not until either he escaped or died.
Behind him, he heard muffled words, cursing in English and such. A horrible wrenching noise added itself to the din of sirens, the shouts grew louder, more urgent, and Kurt found it within himself to move, shaking off the paralysis like the snow that would always gather heavy on his fur.
Kurt’s tail lashed against the walls of the vent- because that’s what he must be in, the vent- only dimly registering the aches from the past week’s bruises. His only way out was forward, away from the sirens, the screaming, the shouts that chased after him like a wolf after its prey. Because that was what this was, wasn’t it? The people here thought he was an animal, and they would hunt him down like one.
You are going to die like a dog, his mind supplied, catching up to the bone chilling fear that had been coiling in his gut. He looked like an animal, was caged like an animal, and he was going to spend the rest of his life being treated as if he was never human in the first place.
The thought caused his eyes to burn, as he crawled forward through the vent. He was making progress, he thought, the shouts seeming to quiet down. He allowed his eyes to survey the dark, enclosed space. Kurt gave himself just the barest moment to relax, before his eyes adjusted to the overwhelming darkness. His breath caught, like a hand had risen from his throat and grasped the tail of a dove.
There was no way out. The vent led to a fan, blocking the sight of the vent that must be behind it. The metal was cool and unfeeling beneath the pads of his fingers, and hoping against all hope that it wasn’t screwed in tight, he gave the bars an experimental rattle.
They didn’t move.
He wasn’t going to get out. He was going to die here, alone in this vent, because starving would beat whatever else they would do to him down there. If Kurt was going to die, let it be on his terms. His tail coiled around his leg, and he turned to face the way he had come. Staying would be better than going back, back to the doctors and the eyes that pried and the mouths that said his honey-bright eyes were God’s mistake.
Kurt was a person. His mother had said so, she had made him promise to always believe it. If he died here, it would be by his choice, and his choice only. He curled against himself, fur bristling. It was cold in the vent, and yet the sirens seemed so dim, so far away. He clasped his hands together, heart pounding in his chest.
“Father, I know that I am not an animal. Animals want to survive above all else, and I- I do not. I can’t-” his voice broke. “My mother said… better to die bowing before God, than live kneeling before a man of the world. Would I burn if I chose to die bowing?”
Sobs crowded the words out of his throat, and a moment later, Kurt Wagner tilted his head up as much as he was able to, and said, “Father, if it’s possible, let this cup pass from me. Yet nothing can happen through my power, but if it is your will, it shall be done.”
His words were cut off by the sound of metal, twisting and deforming and tearing, being pried away from whatever bolts had kept it in place. The vent cover. They had torn it off. They were coming, coming for him, and they-
As the guard approached, Kurt’s eyes zeroed in on the tranquilizer gun they were holding. The vial of cloudy off-yellow liquid shifted menacingly in the flashes of light. He suppressed a whimper, unable to stop himself from pressing himself against the grate. He hated himself for acting this way, even for a moment, acting like the animal they wanted him to be. Kurt was human. He was a boy, despite how he looked, and maybe if he could just get this one man to see that-
The man was wearing a tinted gas mask, filtering the sulfur out of the air. Kurt looked up at him, searching for eyes he couldn’t see, pleading with honey-bright eyes filled with tears, so different from the man’s own.
He reached out a trembling hand. “Please,” he whispered. “Just let me die here. Animals cannot choose death, animals cannot sin in such a way that makes this their punishment, please-”
The dart was in his side before he could register a shot had been fired. The world swam, hazy, yet a blaze of pain rocketed up his spine. They were pulling him out by his tail, like a naughty puppy. Even as his mind began to fog over, he dug his claws into the metal, deep as they could go.
With every time they pulled him back, pain exploded up his back, and as they pulled him back, the metal of the vent ripped at his claws, stripping them away until there was little left around the nerve-filled centers, hands leaking blood.
When they finally pulled him from the vent, the torn metal had well and truly shredded him. He collapsed onto the concrete floor as the man from the vent took his mask off, and shook his head. Kurt's eyes were bleary, tears welling from the pain, and watched as the man sighed.
“All that trouble for one damned rat.” He prodded Kurt with the toe of his boot, and bent down, getting on one knee. “This one’s mutation better be fuckin’ worth it.”
Kurt felt the click of a collar snapping around his neck, the press of a button, and then his body began to spasm, wracked with screams that didn’t feel like his own.