Scars Bleed Gold

Friend Or Foe?

Neither of us could make eye contact with the other; some unspoken awkwardness hung over our heads. Every time I felt like speaking up my voice died in my throat– some sense telling me to just stay silent and leave her be. She may have experienced something else entirely.

After rubbing my sore shoulder incessantly for what felt like the hundredth time, Mal broke the silence, rapping a claw against the coarse concrete floor. She grunted as she climbed to her feet and closed the distance across the cell, kneeling before me. That fuzzy feeling intensified.

The lights of her eyes swam through her hollow sockets to and fro as she looked over me. Her paws hovered just millimeters away from contact, trying to gauge what was wrong without possibly worsening it. Repeatedly, she would make eye contact then look away. Her ears were furrowed back the way they got when she was thinking. After a few more moments, she sat back on her haunches and sighed, her arms falling limp to her sides.

"I don't know how to help," was all she could muster.

"Forget about it and ease up, would ya?" I forced a small chuckle out to reassure her, "I'm alright. I'm pretty sure it isn't broken, because I would be crying like a baby right now. It just got hurt when..."

My jaw hung slightly slack as my mind blanked. The last few hours, for the life of me I couldn't get the last experiment out of my head. The events kept replaying in my mind, over and over. From the bald idiot and his ranting about piss, to Mal being a secret agent saving her damsel in distress... The events couldn't seem to stay the same. They felt inconsistent, like I was misremembering and couldn't figure out how it really happened. The one thing that stuck out the most was getting out, it had jarred the both of us and had left me feeling scattered.

Mal snapped a paw in front of me, her claws coming dangerously close to my face. She realized how close it came and withdrew near instantly. Regardless, she had brought me back to Earth.

"I don't know," my eyes fell towards the floor, "It just hurts. I can't really remember exactly what, though– too much going on. It was all weird, like, more than usual." I groaned to myself; has it really gotten to the point that a certain threshold of weirdness is normal?

"Weird?" She hesitated for a moment, her form sagging just barely enough to notice before it straightened. "Absolutely, I suppose it was pretty weird. For our standards. From what happened, what can you remember?"

I wracked through my brain, searching for something I could land a definitive grasp on. It was obscure, vague, hazy. Like trying to remember a dream. Gripping Mal's shoulder for leverage, I attempted to force myself up unsuccessfully. She placed a paw against the small of my back and held me close to her body, straightening her legs as she brought me to my feet.

"Right, so there was this ancient movie thing, like that curse thing from this one film. We watched it, something about a tongue..." Mal winced while I took a step away, then another. Her head followed me back and forth as if she were spectating a tennis match while I paced the short length of our cold cage.

"There were ninjas, with swords, with nun-chucks, um..." I mumbled to myself, mindlessly ticking things off on the hand not massaging my shoulder. "A big explosion, I think, then–"

The sight of a paper plate on the steel table centered in the room froze my pacing. Beside my old phone was a small slab of dried meat with a pitiful dollop of the slop they fed the D-Class inmates.

Over the sound of my gut roaring in demand I was vaguely aware of Mal looming over my shoulder, curious for what had caught my attention. The flaring pain and stomach cramps were a bitter reminder of how long it had been since I had shoved proper food down my gullet.