In My Hands, Know Suffering

43: If You Strike The Match

Staring at nothing sometimes created visuals of pale colors reaching out to paint a bland canvas. He wouldn't often know unless he's already been there, staring, just staring, letting his eyes roll off in wonder, an event filled with nothing.

Castellone couldn't speak, nor could he let out a single sound. If he tried, it was muffled, he himself won't be able to understand what he would try to say. There was no point. It was empty, like the empty in a jar when someone snuck out all the cookies. The kind of empty where a spouse leaves the other one behind, breaking the vow they've set before the law, before their witnesses, before their hearts.

Mercy.

Mercy was not in Sievetech's vocabulary. Not in the way Varmichael explained what they did to the other gifted, like him, if they chose not to cooperate. Bullcrap, he thought, the old geezer was probably just trying to scare him. There was no point in that, he barely even knew mercy.

There was no mercy when he ordered those lives to die. There was no mercy when his parents didn't allow him to apologize for a simple mistake. There was no mercy when Flarion died and Kerxis became witness. There was no mercy when they decided to punish Abrielle.

Varmichael had told him of the activities being done inside such undiscovered atrocity. That every subject of their said experiments were their property, that they were nurtured until they've mastered their gifts, that they were their assets. There were people like him who could do the impossible, he didn't know, he thought he was special, but he clearly wasn't. Abrielle was gifted, and it was in her abilities to evade those with gifts too, but despite that, if she was harmed physically then that was the thing she couldn't avoid.

She could hide from mind readers, escape supernatural threats all done through the mind, or words, but physical contact was her weakness. She couldn't evade that, and perhaps that was the reason why they made her suffer that way. Her cries, her screams, her begging, they were all for one man's vicious pleasure.

His parents lingered on the same ordeal, worked under them, brilliant doctors like how Varmichael praised them. They were contributors to the punishment. How come that wasn't new to him? Of course, he experienced it, although executed in a milder way. He was their son, why would they even dare kill him anyway? He could laugh at the irony. At a young age, he already wished to be dead. Dead. Dead!

Their parents' accident was planned, Kerxis had told him, and it was true. They were killed because of escaping from Sievetech, merely because of wanting to raise their children in a 'safer' environment. Varmichael made it clear that no employee of them was going to get touched by the light outside, that their activities should just be within their walls. What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. It was the same for their case.

Why was the world so fucked up? So messed up? What did he ever do to it? He was the one brought to life, and now, he was going to pay the price all because his ability to sentence people to their deaths were, according to Varmichael, a rare gem, and to atone for his parents' mistake. They had plans for him, that they wanted to brainwash him, make him new, reborn. But those plans, absurd as it may have sounded, maybe even in the form of blueprints, were yet to be disclosed elsewhere. They've already set his future for him without his consent.

The let down of it all was, they planned to keep Abrielle alive for the mere fact that she was the only one who could suppress him. After watching her being tortured, after hearing her cries, what would they expect him to say? He couldn't even speak. Not a damn single word. His temper, like the usual, boiled inside. Someone was definitely going to get it this time.

They could behead her, preserve her head, and when he's spoken the wrong words, they would simply let her head do the miracle of suppressing the death sentence. It was a mere idea, yet to be seen, to come to light, but after all those torture? There was a possibility.