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Pain was a word that had lost meaning a very long time ago. Life wasn’t pain, anymore. Life simply was. There was no distinction between days when he was hurting and days when he wasn’t anymore, because Alex could no longer see any difference in days. There was no longer any such thing as time, a concept that had been lost to the man in what could have been hours ago or could have been years; he simply didn’t know anymore.

Nor did he care. That was what had saved Alex. He had, after two years of psychological and physical torture, had finally learned how not to care.

They kept him chained to a wheelchair cause he had taken to scratching at his wrists when his hands were free; he wasn’t trying to draw blood, but it ended up happening because, no matter how much Alex scratched, the itching under his skin just never went away. Even now he could feel that insistent itching inside his veins, begging for relief…but he wasn’t bothered by it. He just stared, quietly, at the wall of the room they had left him in. His room, he supposed. It wouldn’t have made a difference, if they had put him in another spot or not; he couldn’t see anything anyway. They had taken to always turning the lights off when they were storing him. He didn’t know if that was another one of their experiments, or if they were simply saving money on electricity. He didn’t care.

“Alex,” Josh whispered, somewhere from behind Alex’s wheelchair, his small hand resting on Alex’s shoulders, his grip just a tad too firm, “What are you doing here?”

Alex idly looked over to his shoulder and, yes, saw the small, pale hand that he knew to belong to his brother. That didn’t mean the hand was actually there. The doctors had let up on the shock therapy and the drugs and, well, on him, enough the last few weeks to where Alex was lucid enough to know most of the stuff he was seeing most of the times wasn’t actually happening. He knew, in an impersonal sort of way, that a lot of his memories were false, made up by either himself or the doctors. He knew that maybe all of his memories were a lie…and that there might actually be no such person as Josh Shepherd, or Alex Shepherd either. He had known the truth once. He couldn’t remember what that truth was anymore.

He didn’t care anymore.

Still, it was his brother, and he loved his brother, even if his brother had never actually existed, so he whispered, “I guess I’m here because I owe you, Josh.”

The hand squeezed his shoulder, and it felt different as a softer, more feminine voice asked curiously, “Who’s Josh?”

Alex closed his eyes, and James opened them as he answered, softly and sadly, “I don’t know. No one, I guess…Mary?”

The woman came around, her soft seductive smile and tight, revealing clothing speaking volumes as she sat on his lap, a hand possessively going down his cheek as she whispered, “No James, I’m Maria, remember?”

James tried to shrink away from her, frightened as he avoided her gaze, the gaze that always seemed to say ‘I know what you’re thinking, and yes, I’m that flexible’. “What are you doing here, Maria? I thought I sent you away?”

Maria smirked, leaning her face in until her breath brushed softly against his lips as she said, “No, James, that’s what you wanted to say. What you actually said was that you needed me, and wanted me to stay…so, here I am, big boy. Is it everything you’d dreamed it be?” Her face then twisted and grew pale, and while she had leaned in for a kiss, she coughed on him instead. James closed his eyes to shield himself from the spray, and when he opened them, Travis wasn’t surprised to see a badly burned little girl sitting on his lap, shyly twiddling her burnt, charred fingers as she stared at the ground, her eyes wet with unshed tears.

“I’m sorry I didn’t save you in time,” Travis whispered, completely sincere. He kept thinking that if he had only gone faster, if he had just hurried, he might have been able to save this girl before her flesh was irreparably scarred. He felt responsible. “I’m sorry.”

The little girl smiled sweetly up at him, the kind expression distorted by her morphed and burned face, when suddenly his eyes grew wide, and little Walter looked up at Henry and said in a small, frightened voice, “Dad? Where are you? I can’t see your face!”

Little Walter couldn’t see Henry’s face because it was being covered by big Walter’s hands, those strong, cruel limps covering up Henry’s mouth and nose in this weak, bound moment, his breath, foul and uncared for, making Henry’s ear unbearably hot as he whispered, “This is it, Henry. That last of the ritual. My Receiver of Wisdom.”

As little Walter jumped down from Henry’s lap, shouting out in an even more frightened , urgent voice, “Mom? Mom? Let me in! The bad man’s here!” Henry, who always managed to keep his cool, to keep his emotions, suddenly felt tears in his eyes as he gasped for breath, devastated because it had been too long, too long, and Cheryl was probably dead by now.

“Cheryl…” Harry sobbed, tugging fruitlessly at his bound wrists, which itched, they itched so bad that sometimes Harry couldn’t stand it and would start to scream, “Please come home. Please, God, let my Cheryl come home safely…”

And suddenly there was light and Harry looked up eagerly to see if Cheryl had managed to find her way to him, but upon his eyes adjusting to the light of the open doorway, Alex sighed to see it was just the doctors again, faceless and impersonal behind their masks, coming to take him away to do…whatever they felt like, he supposed.

As one of the doctors took the back of his wheelchair and started wheeling him away, the other doctor commented, “Looks like Subject Zero’s been crying again. I’ll have to report that to the Doctor, he likes to log that sort of thing.”

“Who do you think he was this time?” The doctor pushing him in his wheelchair asked conversationally, as if he was talking about some interesting television show, “Harry, maybe?”

“Nah, I bet it was James. The wuss bursts into tears every other week. Definitely the most emotional out of ‘em.”

“You know what I heard,” the other Doctor replied with something akin to laughter in his voice, “The Doctor’s going to convince him he’s a girl next.”

The doctors took him to an elevator, and Alex recognized it. He was pretty sure he had died on this elevator, once…but, that was probably just a dream…maybe. He couldn’t remember. He didn’t care.

“Seriously, a girl? That should be interesting. I wonder what her backstory will be.”

“I don’t know, but you know what I’m going to recommend? I think they should convince him he’s Cheryl.”

Both the doctors laughed as if this was the most amusing thing they had ever heard, though Alex didn’t understand a bit of it. The conversation made as much sense to him as explaining the color orange to a blind person; he didn’t know who Cheyrl was, had never heard of James, and couldn’t recall ever meeting someone named Harry. He didn’t understand what they were talking about at all.

And as, with blank eyes, he watched the elevator doors he might have once died on close them in, he just didn’t care.