Scrambled Connections
8. Scrambled Connections
Warmth. Comfort. Motion. Safety.
Cold. Hard. Restraints. Danger.
He was tired. So, so very tired. Maybe he should get some rest.
It could no longer remember the last time it slept. Instinct is what kept it awake, instinct and fear.
Then someone shined a light in his face. Bright. Painful. He shut his eyes, told them to turn the d’ast thing off, let him sleep.
When the lights went dim, it stiffened. It knew what was coming next. It squeezed its eyes closed, whimpering in distress.
He could make out vague shapes past the light. A face, brown and indistinct. Everything was like that. Fuzzy. Desaturated. He could hear voices nearby, but muffled, as though spoken through a cloth mask.
Even in the darkness, it could see with horrible clarity the faces of the people who would hurt it. Their words, cold and sharp, cut through its heart with more precision than any of their scalpels.
“Rocket! Oh, Bast…stay awake!”
His own voice sounded distant to his ears. Weak. Mangled. “Mmmhf…do—don’t wanna…”
“You look rather weary, 89P-13. Why don’t you get some rest?”
Unable to vocalise its unwillingness, it shook its head back and forth rapidly, eyes darting around the room as if searching for an escape.
A hand entered his field of view, blue gloves reaching for his neck—Back…off!—but the words weren’t coming, and suddenly he couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t see—he was drowning.
“…are you doing?”
“Need to suction…”
“—lp me get him…table.”
He felt a hand against his muzzle, something being pushed into his jaws—he struggled weakly against the intruder, trying to back away, but there was another hand against his head keeping him in place.
It tried to scream, to bite, to do anything, but they were holding its mouth tightly, adjusting the leather straps restraining it so that they cut into its wrists, drawing blood. A muzzle clamped over its jaws, freeing their hands from the risk of being bitten.
A scalpel, clean and carefully held, passed in and out of his vision briefly—a bone saw, rusted and cracked, shook in the hands of the newest lab worker as she waved it in front of its face, as her colleagues directed her.
The woman leaning over him now was tall, with proud features and a shaven head. “My queen? He is still awake. Perhaps we should restrain him?”
“Absolutely not, Okoye. Double the dose of anesthesia. Doctor Banner! Do you know how to work a cellular regeneration machine? He’ll need blood.”
“Triggering the fight-or-flight response before the operation makes the subject less likely to attempt retaliation until after the procedure is complete.”
It cried out from behind the muzzle as the saw pierced its skin, flaying apart the flesh and sinew and exposing its sternum.
Oh God—no, no, no no no. Listen to me—oh, God. Stop. Please! Nothing came out but strangled hisses and growls, and he squeezed his eyes shut, unable to watch as the scalpel cut just beneath his rib cage. Once more, voices interrupted his attempts to ignore what was happening. They were angry. Combative. He cracked his eyes open, trying to track the source of the noise.
“Hey, let me see—I can help him, damn you!”
“—almost killed him earlier, you imbecile! Give me one reason not to cut you down where you stand!”
A thunk and a crash—someone being struck and falling, perhaps. A flash of blues and purples, black eyes peering into his angrily. “Fox, if you die and leave me with these fools, I swear that I will drag you back from the realm of the dead and kill you myself.”
“—Nebula! I must ask you to please stand away from him—damn! Why is he still awake?! I do not think we can safely increase the anesthetic again, and if I do not start extracting the fragments now—“
“Doctor? We are to proceed without anesthesia?”
“Yes. We can more accurately determine if the implants successfully integrate with the subject’s natural immune system.”
“I am sorry, Rocket… Please, forgive me.”
The scalpel went down again, and the raccoonoid could see the humans’ faces, etched with concern and pity—.
The scientists’ apathetic expressions bore into its mind, and they spoke of their lives outside this place—as though digging through and tinkering with 89P-13’s body was nothing more than a casual hobby—.
As the pain began to overwhelm his senses, Rocket finally found his voice and screamed a desperate plea; while many years ago, in a laboratory buried deep beneath the surface of Halfworld, a miserable creature let out the first meaningful words in its short existence.
The words kept replaying in Tony Stark’s head, over and over. He turned over the device he was working on and dug the tweezers into it, frowning as it sparked in protest at the disturbance.
“P-please!”
His mind drifted between a cave in Afghanistan and an operating table barely a ten minute walk away.
“—please! I—I…”
The man hadn’t objected when Shuri directed Okoye to lead him out of the lab. Nor had he resisted when Nebula had lunged at his throat as he left, right before everything went to hell.
“Wh-why c-c…”
Even the combined strength of Rogers, Banner and Rhodes wasn’t enough to hold her back when Rocket’s heart stopped for the first time. The second time it happened, Shuri was forced to sedate her.
“Why can’t you just let me die here?!”
Tony scowled at the hunk of machinery in front of him, ripping out the offending wires and tossing them to the side of the table. He activated his kimoyo beads and scanned the circuit again, bringing up a holographic display of the schematics.
It had been simple enough to design a language cipher on the way back from Titan, with Nebula’s help matching the Kree alphabet to the sounds each symbol made, and then mapping those sounds to their English equivalent. Building the damn thing was another matter entirely. Nebula was loathe to help him now—any rapport he had with the Luphomoid was gone when she found out what happened to Rocket, and as for the raccoonoid in question…
God...How long has he been in there, now?
“Forty-five hours, Stark. Forty-five.”
The man whirled around, instinctively raising the tweezers in his hand like a weapon. He sputtered like a fool for several seconds, prompting Shuri to roll her eyes. She had changed from scrubs into what looked like night attire.
“I-I’m sorry?”
The young woman scoffed and stepped into the room, leaving the door open. “You should be. I have been awake for over forty-five hours. The first ten were relatively normal. Then I spent the next twenty making sure your Guardian comrade did not die on a table. After that I had a meeting with the leaders of the other tribes which lasted fourteen hours regarding this incident.”
Stark got to his feet a little too quickly, pocketing the scraps he was working on for later. “H-how’s he doing?”
“He is alive, and very lucky to be that way. The blades broke against his ribs in two places. Another knife barely missed severing his neural implant from his spinal cord. While he is out of imminent danger, I am insisting he remain under observation for at least a week—”
Shuri stopped as her kimoyo beads flickered to life. She read the message briefly, before waving it away and turning to leave. She paused at the door just long enough to give the man an encouraging smile.
“You may ask Rocket yourself for any further details, Stark. He is awake, and he wants to see you.”