Colours // Poofless AU

Chapter 19

Rob's POV

Arsement's phone stares back at me as I continue typing away at reports. I feel a pang in my heart when I think about what I just did. I lied to one of his friends about where he was. I bet everyone was worried sick about him. None of this feels right at all. Yes, he may be around the correct age for the experiments, but something is off.

I wish I had stood my ground more than that. If I had just said no, we wouldn't be in this situation. We wouldn't have hired a student to kidnap Arsement, wouldn't be wasting any supplies on him, and I wouldn't feel so guilty.

I don't quite understand why I feel guilty. I won't be doing the operations, and plus he's just another subject. He could help us figure out how to stop The Colours. But... do I really want that? The only reason I'm here is because my parents wanted me to. That's all I needed to go to college for it. I've always just wanted to make my parents proud of me.

I never was in the spotlight as a child. My older brother was the beloved child. Mom and Dad would praise him for getting an A on his report card while I would get an 'Okay' from them when an A popped up. I never minded it, though. I knew that I was destined for something great.

Because of that thought, I listen to my parents even more. Without me realizing it at the time, they were always planting an idea in my head that The Colours have been harming the world. Sometimes my mother would say that they have some type of disease that makes them hallucinate and lie about the things they can see. That made me more curious than anything. Little did I know at the time that this thought of being destined for something would turn into the hope to make my parents proud.

Now I'm here. Maybe if I never listened in on my parents, I would be doing something with my life other than destroying others. I know what happens after subjects in here for longer than a month. They start to forget the difference between a test and relaxation because that's all we do. Well, we also poke their brain and run experiments on them. It begins to merge together into a blob of pain and suffering.

"Rob?" a voice calls out and I am taken away from my thoughts. I notice that I had stopped typing and there are only a couple hundred words on screen.

I over to the person and see Mat staring at me intently. A shiver comes over me just at the sight of him. "O-oh, hey Mat."

"So, Arsement has his room now," he states. "When can we start the first experiment? I'm thinking maybe in a few hours we can have a full body scan."

I lump forms in my throat. Arsement is still a teen right now. He will be eighteen tomorrow, so it would be better to wait, but how can I tell Mat? All he'll do is threaten me.

"I think that we should wait for tomorrow. Cause, 'ya know... uh, he'll need time to get used to this place," I stutter. I have to think quickly to make sure he doesn't go through the trauma that is here.

Mat rolls his eyes. "A few hours is enough time to get used to grey walls."

"Well, didn't we design the rooms to play with their minds?" I question. "If we don't keep him in there for the right amount of time, which is a day or two, it may mess up all of our experiments. We don't want to waste perfectly good equipment, right?"

He shuffles his feet. "Yeah," Mat acknowledges, "I guess. I'm just eager to find out if he is a Colour or not. He potentially could have opened up a new category!"

"Well, there is a hypothesis I've conducted after reading this."

I turn around in my chair and pull up Arsement's new file full of more in depth information. Mat strolls over to my desk and peers over my shoulder. I've been trying my best to prove that Arsement isn't one of them, and maybe I had found it. I highlight some lines and read them out loud.

"Preston Blaine Arsement is an academic genius that all throughout his life has gotten high honour roll and perfect attendance occasionally. His whole family has no traces of Colours anywhere in sight. Mental disorders have only been in the following family members: Tracy Poses and Chadery Arsement. Poses was Arsement's great great grandmother that suffered from Chronic Schizophrenia at age seventeen. She would be one hundred thirty-six at this time. Her Schizophrenia caused her to go into a mental institution. After three years inside, she stole a pen from a nurse and stabbed in into her neck. She was found at seven o' nine in the morning with no pulse. In the corner of the room, a police officer found a napkin that had the words 'He made me do it, I swear' on it. It was never confirmed if Poses was the one to write it or who He is.

Arsement is the subjects' third cousin and got it at age seventeen as well. He's now forty-nine. He suffers from chronic Bipolar disorder that can cause him to go into furious fits that can end in holes in walls and furniture broken into small pieces. He has only injured one person in his life, but he has been sent to the hospital multiple times for inflicting damage onto himself. He is currently in a mental institution and has been there for multiple months. He may be let out in the following year."

"Woah," Mat breathes out after a few moments of silence. "That's crazy."

"I know," I nod, "but remember, these are the only two in his whole history. It is possible that he could be the next in his family. It's very rare in this family tree to have it, but both of them sadly earned these disorders, or they popped up more frequently at that age. He might have it, right?"

Mat shakes his head slightly. "That's a long shot."

"It's one I'm willing to take." He shoots me a glare that says 'What are you even thinking?'

"Welp," he states, "if you're so willing to believe this, I'll send Howell an email to find the best doctors in our lab to do a full body scan. Then, maybe, we can talk about mental illness and not a new category."

Swiftly, he turns around to his desk and starts emailing Dan. I feel myself begin to sweat at the thought of Arsement not even having any disorder and Mat feeling ashamed of me. He would think we just wasted so much on a stupid hypothesis and do unimaginable things to me. It makes me cringe just thinking about it.

Mat taps enter and shuts down his set-up. After picking up his clipboard and pen, he smiles at me widely and makes his way out the door.

What did I just do?