Chapter Text
Sylvanas had been in the cell for two days before anyone came in.
The cell itself wasn’t airtight: There was a vent in the upper corner; but eighteen inches in, the vent was covered with mesh that managed to keep her from slipping out that way. Otherwise, it was a cube eight feet on a side, with a single door opposite the vent.
The walls were glass with a white backing; Sylvanas suspected one of them was a one-way mirror or had a camera hidden somewhere. She’d looked, but hadn’t otherwise found any way to spy on her.
Not that she was doing anything interesting. Two days spent hovering near the vent as a black cloud. If they were going to leave her in here until she starved to death, she wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction of resuming a corporeal form.
After two days, though—which she only knew because the lights turned on and off at extended, approximately-twelve hour intervals—the door opened and someone walked inside.
A person. Humanoid. In a hazmat suit with a reflective face plate. Carrying a tray with a glass of water, a sandwich and carrot sticks.
Sylvanas swirled in discontent.
The food was useless to her, although the humanoid might not be—if she could get access to their skin, if she could touch them, she could feed.
Silently, the person put the tray down and then left.
Sylvanas did not leave her corner.
She did not experience boredom, precisely. Especially as a cloud, she mostly experienced the passage of time at a distance, a cassette tape on fast forward. So the time between visits was no issue, nor was the food tempting to her, not even as something to do.
She did, however, want to know more about the person.
One complete dark-light cycle later, the person returned. They removed the tray and replaced it with a new one, this one with a nearly-raw steak.
Still dead, though. Still not edible.
Another day, another visit, another tray. Soup, she thought, and beverages. Liquids, definitely.
By the fourth visit, they seemed to be trying to find what she would eat. This tray contained rocks and dirt. Sylvanas regarded it from her corner.
The mesh behind the vent was impenetrable. She kept trying.
A week, and then the person—the same person? perhaps. They didn’t wear a nametag, which was irritating, but every day the visitor had been the same height, same build, same careful movements—brought a mouse.
Sylvanas restrained herself until the person had left again. The mouse ran frantically from corner to corner, looking for something to hide under.
No such luck. An empty, white, evenly lit, eight foot cube. Sylvanas hadn’t even been given a toilet. Not that she needed one, but it was the thought that counted.
And then, some time after being left—in case the person came back—Sylvanas dipped from her corner, swooped to the floor, her essence extending, coiling, solidifying.
The mouse knew sharp teeth and red eyes, before she ate its soul.
It was no great meal.
She would, eventually, starve to death, if they provided her with a single mouse a day. It would be drawn out, slow, gradually agonizing. But better than starving without the mouse.
The next day, the visitor returned, with another mouse in a cage. “If you understand me, descend from the ceiling.”
Absolutely not.
Sylvanas didn’t move for a minute—five minutes—ten minutes.
Eventually the visitor left, and took the mouse with them.
Sylvanas coiled unhappily.
The following day, she descended as instructed.
The visitor made a satisfied noise, and let the mouse out of the cage.
Sylvanas didn’t eat it until the person was gone, for whatever good that did. But they both knew now what her price was, and what her limit.
The questions grew more invasive, although after the first few days, the visitor started bringing multiple mice—one per question answered. The first set of questions were all of a theme: How old was she, how many forms could she take, did she always look the same when corporeal, where had she been, did she speak a human language, could she transform while someone was watching?
Uncomfortable with what this indicated, Sylvanas stubbornly remained a cloud of smoke except when feeding. She gave answers to yes-or-no questions by rising and descending, and to more complicated ones through a hotter-colder system.
And then the day came when the visitor came in with a large, solid black rooster.
As far as Sylvanas could tell, the person had been the same every day. Whether they got days off, who they were, whether this was paid or involuntary labor, what their opinion of Sylvanas was—all unclear. Their voice was distorted through a speaker, and otherwise all Sylvanas knew was they were roughly average height, build, and had a normal gait.
“Take corporeal form,” the visitor said, with the angry rooster in a cage.
Roosters were much larger than mice. Sylvanas strictly was doing fine, eating around four mice a day in the last week, and could survive indefinitely with that amount. She didn’t need a whole rooster.
But she wanted it.
Mice were flighty and boring, especially the identical white lab mice the visitor had been bringing. And roosters, fittingly, could announce death; black ones were traitors. She had been in this cell too long, with nothing to do or think about other than what the visitor wanted, trying to pick apart slight variations in question phrasing, pondering whether the rate of one mouse per question would change depending on the weight of the question—it seemed yes, and so therefore had all the previous questions been of the same import to the questioner?
And in a cloud of smoke, there was only so much she could do to signal her displeasure.
Compliance grated at her even as she took full form for the first time since her capture.
She could not be mistaken for a human. She was short, not disproportionately so, but shorter than her interrogator, and willowy. Corpse-hair, blonde and fragile, that came down past her shoulders and fell into her eyes. Corpse-skin too, grey and paper-thin, and blood-red eyes. Ears too long, fingers too long, teeth too long. The banshee of old wives’ tales, who came to wail your death. Her clothes were stolen and worn, a ragged maroon jumper and too-large cargo pants, held up with a flaking leather belt.
The visitor—looked was a guess, but kept their faceplate turned toward Sylvanas for a long time, motionless. Finally they said, “Thank you.”
They left the rooster in the cage.
Sylvanas’s fingers made quick work of the latch, and then the rooster itself, teeth cutting the jugular before it could panic. This blood, this soul was richer and deeper than the mice, more brash and confident. Cockier, if she might be forgiven the pun.
Her thoughts inevitably turned to what could be done with the cage, but her cell door had no lock on the inside to pick, no hinges to pry apart. The vent held potential, if she stretched, but she couldn’t manipulate objects as a cloud.
So perhaps better to pretend to be harmless, leave the cage intact and let her visitor think her defanged and peaceful. Bide her time for a better opportunity, a more vulnerable opening.
The days continued. The visitor asked questions about her abilities, her feeding habits, her ability to foretell death. With Sylvanas in corporeal form, she gave longer, more detailed answers, and the roosters became more common.
She did, at one point, disassemble a cage and manage to shove a piece of it under the vent cover, but without the ability to stand on the wall and reach down the shaft to the mesh barrier, this proved to be useless.
This did have the interesting result of someone else coming in—also in the full hazmat suit, but distinctly shorter and stockier than her visitor—to repair the vent and remove the cage. This person only addressed her to give curt, threatening orders, which Sylvanas complied with. She still didn’t know how they had captured her, or why she was unable to pass through the mesh. These people presumably had other tools that could be used to force her obedience. Better to not resist quite yet.
The next day the visitor brought one mouse again. A punishment, of sorts.
The questions weren’t quite interesting enough to keep her occupied, even with the potential for dissecting what the visitor was using them for. So eventually, after a month of this, Sylvanas posed a question of her own.
“Can I have your name?”
The visitor had been in the middle of asking about a family Sylvanas had pursued for generations. They stopped, hesitated. Finally said, “No. Not like that.”
Sylvanas had not been given a name in centuries, so this was fair. “How may I refer to you, then?”
“To whom would you speak of me?” the visitor responded—quick, perhaps even bright through the voice changer.
Sylvanas smiled, a mouth full of needle-teeth, entirely against her own will. “To myself, and eventually to others.”
Another pause, and then, Sylvanas might infer sadness, “You will never leave this place.”
Later, Sylvanas would doubt that. She had lived for thousands of years, and this civilization would change and twist as every one had before them. Someday even the longest of memories would falter, this building would decay, and she would once again haunt those who death had touched.
Then, though, then Sylvanas rushed her visitor, wailing—although it would have no effect, because she did not know the person’s name, she did not know their family or their residence, she had never seen their face and could not see their death coming—and lashed out with one clawed hand, seeking to drive them up against the wall.
Even as she moved, though, the visitor was drawing something from their belt, something that sizzled, and—
A sharp shock to her hand, and she recoiled, still snarling.
The visitor said, “Note for the record that Specimen 1022 responds typically to a taser.”
Sylvanas hissed.
“I will see you in four days,” the visitor said, and left.
When the four days had passed, the visitor returned with a cage full of mice and a clipboard.
“You may call me Jaina,” they said. “How do you prefer to be named?”
Sylvanas turned the name over. “Jaina.” It had a little power. Not quite enough, not when so carefully delivered, but some. “A woman?”
The visitor went still, but finally said, “Yes.”
That piece gave her no power at all, but it was pleasant. When Sylvanas grew bored, when there were none of the soon-to-be-dead who needed warning, she went to clubs and conventions, places where face paint was common and her appearance unquestioned, even complimented. And then she took to bed some pretty woman, and forbore to feed from her, and only whispered her death if she asked first.
So there was a woman under the hazmat suit. A woman who could be called Jaina.
“And you?” Jaina said, with a little more emphasis even through the distortion.
“Yes,” Sylvanas said, unhelpfully.
For a pleasing moment she thought Jaina would stomp her foot. “Do you wish to remain Specimen 1022?” Jaina said instead.
Sylvanas crossed her arms. “Will that designation be removed if I tell you a name for me? Or will that name merely become my subheading?”
“I answered your question. Be fair, and answer mine.”
Thus compelled, Sylvanas said, “You may call me Sylvanas. This form is approximately correct.”
Jaina noted some things on her clipboard, and then the interrogation returned to the norm.
Somehow Jaina never seemed to run low on questions. Over another month, she began asking Sylvanas to demonstrate things. Some Sylvanas was willing to do—even feed, because perhaps under that suit was a human of base desires, and many humans enjoyed the pain and danger Sylvanas brought to bed—and some she could not or would not do, not in this cell, not under that faceless gaze.
The animals continued, although with more information the supply became targeted to what Sylvanas needed, rather than increasingly large amounts.
At the end of the third month, Jaina came in with a caged rabbit and a syringe.
Sylvanas still spent most of the time as a small cloud, and was not inclined to coalesce given that ominous addition.
After a moment, Jaina sighed and put the cage down. “You know I have bosses,” she said, which was in its own way promising. It was undeniable that Jaina could force her into cooperation. All she would have to do was withhold food for a few days, a week at most, and Sylvanas would come crawling.
So that Jaina wasn’t doing that, was being open about her own pressures...Promising. Still did not bode well for Sylvanas’s ability to get through this without that syringe going in her body.
“There’s an expectation of results, which thus far I have been able to meet.” Jaina tapped the—capped—syringe against her other hand. “But my methods are—unorthodox, and not, uh...The deadline for this is tomorrow, so if I can’t do it, someone else will. Tomorrow.”
The stuttering was unusual. Usually Jaina was quite composed, even if Sylvanas was being deliberately provocative.
Sylvanas could remain incorporeal. She could continue to drift about near the vent, and postpone this development. She could wait them all out, she could make them spend the small fortune it took to make the potion that could force her to material form. She wanted to take this route, wanted to spite them, wanted to be difficult and really make them work for every concession they got from her, the thing they had trapped in a box.
Against that rage and bitterness, set this: They had already spent that fortune once. They had trapped her at a club, baited her in and then spiked her drink, and so they absolutely had the resources to do it again. Sylvanas could comply now or be forced later, but that syringe was going in.
At least if Jaina did it, there would be some sort of low dignity.
Sylvanas took form, exactly as disheveled as she had been the first time. “Some questions first.”
Jaina nodded, an exaggerated motion in the hazmat suit. “Three.”
Fine. The woman was too damn smart. “What does it do?”
Not promising that Jaina took a minute to respond. There was something else then, something she was trying to avoid Sylvanas finding out. “It contains a monitor to track certain vitals. I’ll request that you remain in that form for a little bit afterward, so we can run tests.”
That wasn’t ideal, and the thought, grinding and awful in her spine, that they would know yet more about her, have more sharp details to stab her with later, be able to target her more precisely, made her almost discorporate again.
Fortunately, though, there was an enormous loophole. “And then our agreement is over?”
“Yes.”
Instant response, very good. There would be some tests, a little bit, perhaps an hour, maybe more, and then she could dissolve and let the damned monitor fall to the floor.
She still had a third question, though, and intended to make good use of it. “Since I am being so cooperative...”
Jaina snorted, an interesting noise through the vocal distorter.
“May I see your face?”
Jaina’s name gave her power, but not very much, not enough to do anything with, to know anything. Her face and voice would be enough, would allow Sylvanas to exercise something, do something, make use of this somehow, hold it against Jaina or even accelerate it, kill her and use the power of her death to create an escape.
For a long moment, Jaina didn’t move. Finally she said, “Yes, but after the injection.”
Sylvanas could handle that. “Swear to it,” she said, voice echoing.
“I swear, I will show you my face after I have injected you.”
It wasn’t a lie.
Three questions, three honest answers. Sylvanas pulled a sleeve up.
Jaina hesitated. “Back of the neck, I’m afraid.”
Odd. Unusual, to Sylvanas’s knowledge, but then again, most syringes didn’t contain little tracking devices. Perhaps all of them went in the back of the neck. Obedient, compliant, she turned around and held her hair up.
Jaina approached. There was the firm, cold press of a rubber glove against the nape of her neck, a prick—a sting, Sylvanas jerked away despite herself, and then Jaina said, “Done.”
As Sylvanas turned back, fighting the urge to rub her neck, Jaina was unfastening the outer layer of the suit. A flap, a buckle, then a zip down the front, exposing a plain white shirt. And really nice tits, Sylvanas’s libido noted unhelpfully. Then Jaina had to undo the breathing apparatus in order to push back the hood.
Underneath the vibrant yellow protective gear, Jaina was only slightly taller than Sylvanas, a blonde gracefully turning to grey, with dimples and crows’ feet speaking to good humor. “Well,” she said, with a slight frown. “I suppose I didn’t agree on a timeline, but it’s a little late now.” She was right, and Sylvanas had missed that loophole in the relief of trapping Jaina in her own words.
An alto, with a well-educated accent—and more importantly, Sylvanas now knew her face, voice, and name.
Her death was undefined, which was promising. Most deaths were clear, prominent in someone’s aura—a car accident in three years, cancer at eighty five, a tossup between an accidental shooting and a heart attack. But those Sylvanas could intervene in were always fuzzy, vague and malleable. This was someone she could kill. This was a viable target.
There were also few others linked to her, few family members whose deaths Sylvanas could sing, a mother, a brother, nothing more. That was rare but not unknown. Sylvanas could sense tragedies there, losses made larger by unaddressed grief. Perhaps she would exploit that, use those wounds to compel Jaina to free her. Stranger things had happened.
Jaina didn’t take off the rest of the hazmat suit, but she didn’t put the hood back up either. “Right. Those tests. One second.”
She opened the door and stepped through briefly. Sylvanas had twice tried to follow when Jaina was leaving after her daily visits, once solid and once incorporeal. The first time had been foiled by Jaina’s taser, the second by a fan placed directly across the hallway. Irritatingly competent humans.
This time Jaina returned with a set of cuffs—wrists and ankles, connected by chains that looked just long enough to allow walking.
“I agreed to the tests,” Sylvanas said, sharp and biting. “Not this.”
Without the faceplate, Jaina was astonishingly expressive. She wrinkled her nose briefly, distasteful, and said, “Institute policy I’m afraid. Subjects are not to be outside their cells without adequate containment.”
She thought about putting up a fight—demanding Jaina bring the test equipment in here, or otherwise resist, force Jaina into action. But the thought, the allure of being out of the cell, of having this chance at freedom...Sylvanas demurely put her wrists out.
The handcuffs appeared standard issue. Jaina blushed slightly putting them on her—Sylvanas took advantage of this to ogle her openly, sweeping her eyes over Jaina’s chest—and then crouched to cuff Sylvanas’s ankles.
“Let’s go.” Again Jaina stepped out into the corridor, and this time, for the first time in months, Sylvanas followed.
It was a bit of a disappointment. She had ultimately been unconscious—itself a novelty—when they brought her in, and she remembered nothing between the nightclub and waking up in the cell. To finally see something other than the white walls of her cell and the beige wall of the corridor across from it—Sylvanas had been hoping, perhaps, for stupid motivational posters. Or office doors.
Instead it was a long hallway, boring beige walls in both directions, behind them a barred door labeled EXIT, and at the other end, an elevator. And every eight feet precisely, another closed, locked door on either side.
Sylvanas’s stomach sank.
Each door had a number—they had just come out of #1022. The doors mostly went up sequentially, although sometimes a number was skipped. She didn’t want to think about why. Periodically, as Jaina walked her down the hallway, there were other doors with normal handles, labeled ominously: Restraints, Fire Suppression System, Break Room, Lockdown Safety Room, Toxic Chemicals, Gas Supply Chamber.
She hadn’t wanted to think about the organization that had captured her. She still didn’t. They were educated, and superstitious in all the most worrying ways; Sylvanas preferred to be a creature of folklore and wary, often unconscious respect. Not...catalogued, like an insect on a corkboard.
One thousand twenty two. She shuddered.
Once in the elevator Jaina swiped a keycard and punched a button. Sylvanas stood in silence. She had agreed to this, and if she hadn’t fully understood the agreement, that was on her. Besides, eventually the tests would be done, or prove more invasive than she was willing to comply with, and she could leave.
She could be free.
Out the elevator and down another corridor, this one smelling of antiseptic and death. Quite a lot of death.
Then into Testing Chamber 3, which inside looked like nothing so much as a gym, and Sylvanas’s eyebrows went up.
“The goal is to understand the limits of your physical body,” Jaina said in a rush, “and where it might differ from a human’s.”
Another person—this one still in a full hazmat suit—came out from a side room. “For fuck’s sake, Proudmoore. How hard is it to follow regulations? They’re there for your safety.”
Jaina said, in a voice that started out strained and quickly climbed several octaves, “The first directive is to get results, which I am doing. With distinction, I might add.”
The other researcher said, “I still have to write it up. The Director will want to have words with you.”
“Do we have to do this in front of the subject?” Jaina said, in a tone that put Sylvanas’s back up.
“In case it was missing in your paperwork,” Sylvanas said, stepping towards the researcher—pleased when they startled back—”I can understand you.”
“Very intimidating,” Jaina said, not sounding intimidated at all, “Do you need a warmup? If not, treadmill, sprint until fatigued.”
Sylvanas complied.
The tests were obnoxious and degrading, but she had agreed, and they were at least something to do other than sit in her cell and wonder which wall contained the cameras. She had to demonstrate strength, speed, stamina. She was asked to do math problems while covering an obstacle course. Every inch of her was measured, scanned, and weighed.
Then Jaina walked her back to her room—chains back on, at least there wasn’t a leash. Inside, someone had already left a large, obviously irritated hen.
“Thank you,” Jaina said, and left.
Sylvanas killed the chicken first, because no point in wasting the blood, and then cracked her neck. This was the longest she had been corporeal in ages, and since Jaina only came once a day, she had a whole night to spend lurking in the vent and pondering how best to use Jaina’s death to facilitate her escape.
Except—
When she went to transform her body, turn it back to the smoke and terror that was her natal form, let herself relax into unbeing, into the freedom of a gaseous form—
It didn’t work.
It didn’t work, and it didn’t work, and it didn’t work she couldn’t transform she was trapped in this body and in this cell and—
She wailed, a lone and screechy thing in this shape, tied to human vocal cords and to human lips, and threw herself at the door.
Again and again, and again and again, and again and again, clawing at it, forcing her nails into the hard white plastic of the walls, producing satisfyingly shrill sounds, putting her shoulder into it as if she could pop it from its hinges, making noises never made by human throats, until—
Jaina came back.