Stranger Like Me

The screams died down in rhythm with the evaporating surges of alchemical power. Another person robbed of his humanity for illegal experimentation, not even given a chance to fight back. The bearded man would then carry them in by their collar and place them in a cage with an older chimera so they could have guidance. It was the last shred of mercy the man possessed. In this hell that smelled of sharp, metal and chemical odors, it was the last thing you could ever hope for.

A cage door slid open with a sound similar to nails on a chalkboard—or more accurately, rusted metal against rusted hinges—and a body was dumped in with a thump, the numerical tag on his collar faintly jingling. I cracked open an eye and saw that I was face to face with the newest addition to the chimera family. And he looked...human. Surprised beyond that of which I was able to convey, I shuffled forward on my belly and pressed my nose against his forehead, giving a faint sigh.
These days, I was terribly lethargic and had little energy. I knew I was dying a long, drawn-out death and for some reason I couldn't quite comprehend, I was okay with that.
“It's...okay...I...have...you...” I told him—#203—even though I was pretty sure he couldn't hear me. #201, the chimera before me, had passed away a few months before and I had been alone since then, save for the man who called himself Michael Varinski.
When I first met him, I thought he was nice. After all, he saved me from the fate of living out my life, until I turned sixteen, in that orphanage; that had to count for something, right? He gained my trust, treated me like a girl of nine years ought to be treated. Then, he lead me into that side room, the one with the bloodstained floor and the array drawn in crisp, white chalk. That's when it all changed and I saw him for what he truly was: a sociopath—no, a monster.

“#203...Please...don't die. Please...” I moved closer to him, my claws scraping lightly against the bottom of the cage as I forced my paws to work correctly. (I had long since come to accept that I was no longer a human, nor did I have the mindset of the eleven year old I was. I gained wisdom beyond my years, living like this.) Nuzzling my way into this boy's arms, I pressed myself against him, sharing the what body heat my furred self had to offer. The contact made him stir slightly and he mumbled something, sounding like he was caught in a nightmare. At that moment, I wished I knew his name so I could say something familiar, something that might offer some sort of comfort to the confused and battered chimera. I huddled closer, and caught the scent of blood, and a sedative that I didn't know the name of, coming from a puncture wound on #203's neck. I winced, and let out a soft whine in empathy; I knew that Varinski had put the drugs straight into the boy's throat instead of his shoulder, indicating that he probably put up a fight. I lifted my muzzle and ran my tongue over the injury gently, until I was certain I had cleaned it thoroughly.
“Rrrgh...”
My eyes snapped open, thinking I heard something, some evidence that this boy was still alive. “...Again...?”
#203's lips twitched slightly and he lifted a hand, fingertips brushing against my leg. He looked sort of confused and pained, letting his hand rest where in landed. He would be in pain for a while—he was lucky to come out of the transmutation alive—since his entire molecular structure that been broken apart, and then rearranged. “...I...Nnn...”
My heart began to beat faster and I pushed my nose against his chest, knowing its coldness would send some sort of jolt to urge him into consciousness. “Again.”
A gasp was drawn from him and the newer chimera squirmed, trying to move away from the cold, his fingers burying into my fur. Slowly, his eyelids pulled upwards and—much to my dismay—revealed a pair of clouded, blue eyes. He was blind! “...Dog?”
Dog? ...Dog! Me! He saw me! Or, at least guessed it was me. I pulled my muzzle into the best smile I could and gave a nod, thrilled that he had said something. “Again...say again.” This was the first test. #203 looked human, but if his mental capacity or his motor skills were lacking, Varinski would take him to a back room and he wouldn't come out.
“...Huh?” The bat—I think he was a bat, he had wings—still seemed confused and shook his head, not seeming to understand. Reaching out his hand again, he ran it carefully over my face, fingers seeming to draw in every detail to make up for lack of sight.
Although the joy in the moment was diminishing, I leaned into his hand, taking this small comfort for what it was, though I really should have been more cautious. “Try...say...name?” Maybe this would work. If he remembered his name, that was a huge leap in the right direction. I, myself, could not remember mine; for as long as I had been in this lab, I had been called #202 and adopted that as my name, if I had even had one before.
#203's brows furrowed in concentration and he bit his lip, trying to force some memory to surface. However, he seemed unaware that his newly formed fangs drew blood from the soft tissue. “My name? My name is...It's Victor,” he told me, after what seemed like the longest time. “Victor O'Brian. ...Wait, wait! You're a dog! D-dogs can't talk. Wh...where AM I?” Sent into a panic, the bat sat up quickly, causing me to have to duck my head in order to avoid getting elbowed in the face.
“Chimera,” I corrected, watching through wide eyes as this boy was overcome with pain and hunkered down in the corner farthest from me.

I said nothing else, just observed as his sides rose and fell with each breath. Out of instinct, he curled his wings around him as far as they would go without being painful. It wasn't until a few minutes later that I realized he was crying and trying to make sense of it all. I forced myself to stand squarely onto my paws and took a few lumbering steps toward #203, a soft whine pulling itself from my throat. “Vic...Vic...tor? Victor?” I had trouble pronouncing the 'vic' part of his name and tried to make up for it by nudging my muzzle under his arm in a gesture of affection.
“A-ah!” Victor jerked away from my touch and let out a shrill squeak, one of his ears flicking backwards in a way that seemed to be against his will. His breath began to come faster as his panic rose, tears flowing freely down the sides of his face. “No, what happened? Why...I don't feel right...Where's Rachael and Alexis? Where are...Where are my sisters?” The tone in his voice was quivering—I could tell that he was close to losing it, and that all I wanted to do more than anything in my life was to help him. The coyote in me had already sworn herself to her bat.
“They're not...here. Bad things...bad...happened,” I wheezed, this talking not good for the lungs I knew were failing. But, I had to try. For his sake. “Lie down... You need...rest.” I drew closer to him, thinking that he might be uncomfortable due to lack of clothing, but there was nothing I could give him. “Vic...tor...?”
The muscles in his shoulder twitched and suddenly he whirled around and faced me, not bothering to hide any of the things that obviously made him male. “Bad things happened! I'm not a human...I don't know WHAT I am and you're telling me BAD THINGS HAPPENED!?” He sat as tall as he could, letting out breath after angry breath as red tinted the very edges of his eyes, no doubt his rising blood pressure.
Cowering down a little submissively, as I was intimidated at his sudden outburst, I tried once again to talk some sense into this boy. “Don't...bad things happen...when you get...m...mad...” I knew myself what would happen, I had experienced it. I wasn't certain Victor would suffer the same fate, but as long as he was a chimera, there was a high possibility.
“NO! You listen here! I'm gonna be mad as HELL until I figure out what. Is. Going. ON!” he shouted, gesticulating to prove his point. Lost in a rant, the bat gripped the bars of the cage and bashed his head into one of the metal rods multiple times, making some sort of incoherent squeaking noise as blood splattered everywhere from a quickly opened wound.
This was what I had been afraid of; the human and animal parts that had been forced together in his brain were at war, causing their owner to lose control and try to separate the halves by force. I emitted a low growl and jumped at him, promptly knocking him over and holding him pinned down to the floor of the cage—as scared as I was, it's possible I drew energy from some unknown reserve. “VICTOR!” I growled, pushing my muzzle into his face, the smell of fresh blood hitting me like a train. “Listen to me!” Of course I didn't want it to succumb to this, but it was my duty to keep my bat alive and he wasn't making it easy. Only when I noticed the terrified look on his face did I remember that this boy couldn't see, and here I was with my fangs bared, looming over him like some sort of vicious animal. I'd like to believe my eyes watered with sadness, but it was really just a side effect of my illness. Nevertheless, I bowed my head and lapped at where Victor had split his forehead open in his rampage, feeling endlessly terrible about what I had just done and feeling the need to basically pamper him. He'd just gone through hell and back, after all. “Sorry...”
Breath hitching, he looked up at me, although I figured all he could see was darkness. Then suddenly, I felt something tugging on the fur around my neck and glanced down, seeing two shaking hands clutching handfuls of the downy hair. I feared that maybe I had hurt him, but I was pulled down so that I lay on top of the bat while he pressed his face into my chest, sobbing without holding back. My heart pained to see him in such distress. How could I feel so deeply about this boy whom I had just met? Was there some sort of inseparable bond that formed between two chimera, locked in a cage and basically sealed to their fate? Victor speaking brought me back to this world.
“I-I'm scared...” he admitted through hiccuping sobs. “I don't know what happened, or where I am, or where my family is...” His voice broke and I gave a soft whimper of understanding. “I...I'm not myself anymore. I can't remember what happened, all I remember is a guy grabbing me...then something went into my neck and I blacked out. And I woke up and there was this light and something really fuckin' hurt and all I could hear were screams—were those mine? Was I screaming? Then I think I blacked out again...And now I'm here with you... Wh...What IS this place?”
Part of me wanted to stay silent to avoid having to speak, it really was tiring for me to do so. This boy was lucky, as a chimera, to speak full sentences without the slightest—except for a small, barely noticeable lisp that came from getting used to new fangs—impediment that hindered his words. The other part of me wanted to give a long, emotional speech but I knew that wasn't within my range. “Victor...this place is...a lab. It is...bad. Very bad. You're...a chimera, human-animal. Get...out...while you can. Don't...die here.” I settled for these words, putting all my hope into that he would suffer a fate better than I, with my lungs weakening and my immune system deteriorating. Had it not been for the medicine Varinski kept me on night and day, I would have crossed the trench to the sweet—or, was it not so sweet?—embrace of death.
An expression of complete and utter sadness came over Victor's features and he began to bawl, once again, without any abandon. And I let him do so. It wasn't my place, nor my right to deny him the very thing that made him still human. No. I couldn't take that away from him.

An hour ticked by until he had finally quieted down to small sniffles and the occasional hiccup; by now, salty tears dripped off the ends of my fur. I think I had fallen asleep once or twice, my body just unable to keep up with my mind. This took a lot out of me, and Victor too it seemed, as the boy was nearly asleep as he still clung to me. Right now, he didn't smell quite as dead now that the drugs were beginning to wear off. (The sedatives really did give people a noticeable scent that lingered like the scent of death.) For the first in my life, I felt like I had something to hold on to that would make my time on this earth worthwhile. Even though Victor might not feel the same, he could go on without knowing how happy he made me, and that was fine. He would be moved into a different cage as soon as Varinski was certain he would live past the first week—part of me prayed that he would allow the bat to stay, for his sake as much as my own. It truly drove a person—chimera—to madness when they sat alone, in the corner of a cold and steel box, with no other breathing being in which to share their fears and worries.
“...#202, was it?” The voice was small and hoarse sounding, no doubt from its previous wailing. “I'm...I'm sorry. I know it don't mean much, but I was so scared. I still don't know what a chimera is, even though I...” he paused, still trying to come to terms with the fact. “am one... But if I want to make it out of here, since you say it's bad, I hafta look on the bright side of things, huh?”
I gave a sort of chortle that expressed my agreement and rolled off of my bat so I lay at his side and not on top of his still aching form where he had held me for so long. Rubbing the side of my face against the hollow of his throat, I thought of what to say. “This place...not happy. But you...make...me happy. You need...to be... happy too...”
He merely looked at me, or, at least listened intently to my voice, in complete silence. Finally, he gave a tiny, content sounding sigh, as if he were accepting his fate. And much to my surprise, his hand found the top of my head and he petted me; what really surprised me was the fact that the touch wasn't what someone would give a dog, it was the kind you would give a small child who had done well, or needed some sort of reassurance. It was...affectionate.
“Y'know...I bet you've never seen a fifteen year old boy cry that much at one time.” Victor waited for me to say something, but I couldn't quite draw the strength to speak. When I didn't respond, he continued. “I don't like crying much. Rachael always bugged me about it when I did. She always said she was more man than I was. I was always, yeah right. You don't have the right equipment. She always ended up winning all of our arguments somehow, when Alexis didn't break us up. Alexis swore up'n down that if Rach ever met a boy as stubborn as she was, the world would end.” The bat stopped once more, looking a bit more pleasant as he talked about the girls I assumed were the sisters he had mentioned earlier. These memories seemed to bring good thoughts to the surface of his mind and I was glad for that, as I really hated to see my boy cry. “...I wonder where they are now...Me and Rachael got in a pretty bad fight and I ran off. That's when I remember getting stabbed with... whatever that thing was.” He moved his hand away from me and rubbed the puncture on his neck, looking troubled. “I cracked my walking stick over the guy's head before I blacked out; I hope it gave him a concussion. Say, is he the same bastard that...uhm...transmutated—trans...transmuted me?”
“Mmh?” Blinking slowly, my eyes fell upon Victor, glazed with exhaustion. I had fallen into a limbo that wasn't quite sleep, but not quite wakefulness as he talked. I never stopped listening to him, his voice making me smile inwardly as the only voice besides Varinski's that I had heard in two years. #201 lacked the ability to communicate vocally, but that didn't cause me to love him less. “Yes... He does all...this. Monster. Bad.” It was a sentence I had to force out of my lungs, which left me wheezing and fighting for breath at the end. This had been the most I talked since I was transmuted; Varinski wasn't a pleasant man to talk to, now that I knew what he was, and #201 and I never needed words to understand each other.
“Guess he really as bad as you say he is, if he did this to me, to you.” The bat sounded like he had a question to ask, but seemed to have decided against it. “Maybe I could...squeeze through these bars...” Wrapping one hand around a metal cylinder, Victor pressed the point of his shoulder through the gap, wriggling to get his chest in position.
My heart was frantic and I struggled to my feet, shaking and panting. “N...N....N-n...No...” It was a low whisper, the best I could manage. If he went through those bars, he would be in trouble. The collar would send off those invisible signals, saying that he was out of the designated area, and he could very well be shocked to kingdom come. I took a single step forward before my joints simply gave up and allowed me to fall heavily to the floor. This new angle allowed me to see the man I so hated walk down the rows of empty “holding chambers” as he sometimes liked to call these prison cells. The look on his face was nothing short of indifferent.
“Almost...There. I think I got it!” He had half his torso out of the cage before he ducked his head down, pushing it through. That was when the silent alarm went off. Electricity crackled and the new chimera found himself yelping and tugging at the collar in a frenzy, trying to rid himself of the painful jolts. “The FUCK is this!?”
“The thing to keep you from running off,” said a smooth, cold voice that reminded me of a knife. Varinski. He approached Victor, but stopped a few feet short and simply watched the younger man struggle. It was easy to see he was pleased to find out that “#203” could speak properly, and that he also had the intelligence to try to form an escape route. I had this intelligence, but often times, the chimera would have a more animalistic mindset and would not even think about escaping. They would merely sulk in a corner.
“Garh...S...s-stop...stop...” From those words, I knew my boy was a fighter. Even with the collar shocking his life from him, he made the garbled sentence sound like nothing less than a demand, an order, not a plea like most would think. Bloody froth formed at the corners of Victor's mouth as he doubled over, curled into a ball. One of his legs kicked out against the floor and he trembled before rolling onto his back and arching his spine upwards, giving a shrill call before he twitched slowly, until he was motionless.
By now, I had forced myself against the bars of the cage, one paw stretched through the bars, wanting to pull him back into what safety there was here. But with those final movements, I could smell death on him, and I knew somehow, that his heart had given out. If I was capable of crying, I would have been able to flood that entire room in tears at that very moment. I knew death. I had grown up with it. I had seen all of the dozen “practice experiments” that stemmed between myself and #203 lose their lives. But this was my boy...my...Victor.

“Seems his heart was unstable,” the alchemist remarked coolly as he paced forward to the bat's body, looking over him from head to toe as he switched the collars to off, cutting the flow of electrodes. “I could let him die...” I swore my heart stopped. “But I am actually quite happy with how he turned out. He's a break-through in science, from what I can tell. The first chimera who looks human, save for a few...flaws.” The way he said that word sent shivers down my spine. “And the material I used is too precious to waste. The bat I fused #203 with was rather hard to track down, but I thought an animal which had eyesight, or lack thereof, similar to his would make the transmutation smoother. It is just a matter of time before I will find out if he can use the same echolocation techniques to find his way around.”
I wanted to rip out his throat. Kill him. The man was just standing there, blabbering away to me, or himself, I didn't know or care. His so called “precious material” was DYING on the FLOOR.
Just as soon as I was about to raise my voice to bark, Varinski took a hold on Victor's collar and drug him to the far wall, which housed a defibrillator. Taking out the device, he warmed it up, filling the air with the faint cackle of static before placing each paddle on the chimera's bare chest. Pressing a button on each defibrillator, a jolt was sent straight to Victor's essential blood supplying organ, making his torso lurch up. No reaction. Another attempt was preformed. No reaction. I bowed my head in respect for the dead—the dead whom I had come to love so very quickly, due to some unexplainable bond.
Another attempt, and, life!
“There we are. That shock did quite a number on you, #203. I hope you learned your lesson.” He began dragging Victor's body back to our 'home' and opened the cage door with a slightly disgruntled expression plaguing his features as he set the bat next to me. “Make sure he doesn't die, #202.” With that, he left.
Was that it? Make sure he doesn't die, huh? Varinski could be sure that I would not take my eye off my cagemate for a single second. I nudged my nose up under his chin, feeling the flicker of the pule that had returned. Giving a choked sob, feeling so god damn horrible for not being able to prevent this from happening, I curled up next to him, feeling the slight coldness of his body. And I prayed. I prayed to any god, celestial being, anything that might listen to my wish that my boy would pull through, that he wouldn't suffer something like brain damage, heart problems... that he would be as normal and healthy as a sin created from taboo could possibly be. I highly doubted there were any sort of gods out there, however. Would a god who 'loved his people' let things like his lab happen? Let so many people die here, without a proper place to call home, stolen from their friends and family... Robbed of their very humanity. I began to quiver, filled up by this maelstrom of emotions with no way to vent them. It was one of the things I learned to get used to, when I realized I couldn't shed tears. Sometimes, when I was alone at night, I would just howl and howl until I had exhausted myself enough that I could pass out and drift into a dreamless sleep. That was the best sleep I ever got. Tonight, I knew, I would try my very best to not pass out, as I had a life basically hanging in my paws. If something happened to him, and I wasn't aware of it, I would never forgive myself. I would curl into a ball in the corner of my cage, and wait for death to pull me from this world.

“Ugh...Everything hurts,” a voice croaked. It was no doubt Victor pulling out from his unconscious state that had lasted about two and a half hours. “And when I say that...I mean everything.” A shaking appendage was raised; he pressed the flat of his palm onto his chest and moved it in a slow circle, feeling the bruised and slightly burned skin. (Varinski hadn't been exactly gentle with the machine.) The hand dropped, in defeat, and the bat brought his knees up to his chest and rolled onto his side, trying to make himself seem small so maybe he would disappear. The blind gaze stared on straight ahead, something disconcerting about it. It seemed...lost. Like he was giving up. “I'm stuck here. I can't get out and this collar won't come off,” he whispered, letting his eyelids droop as the confidence and optimism I felt earlier evaporated into the stale air. His face was pale, and I only noticed now the dark circles under his eyes. Whether he had those before, or after all of this, I wasn't quite sure. “Why does he do this? Why?” Victor asked, his voice prying for answers, and at the same time, wanting to push away all thought of this lab and of himself.
“He...” I attempted to give a halfhearted answer, but his eyes flicked toward the sound of my voice and his brows furrowed. I fell quiet and moved to a corner of the metal box and slid to the ground to sulk. So many lives lost here. Locked up in this prison and sooner or later, they all became insane. I, myself, didn't even know the day, or the month. Just the general time of year that my heat cycles fell into naturally. I didn't know whether it was night or day. I slept when I was tired, which was becoming more often than not.
Victor curled up tighter, letting one limp wing drape over his body like a blanket, covering his paper-white skin. Looked like he was waiting for death, as I was. Could I blame him? “I give up, #202. I give up. There's no damned way out of here. I'm going to die in this cage and there's nothing you or anyone can do about it.” His voice was bitter, sad. “Even if I did get out... what would I do? No one would accept a freak like me, with these...wings and...whatever.”
I reached out to him a bit, scooting closer to comfort him, but found a fist connecting with the end of my muzzle. I yelped, my eyes widening as I saw the bat withdraw, moving to the farthest corner of the cage. Blood began to drip down from where I was struck and I sat there, dumbfounded for a moment, trying to realize fully what had just happened. He...hit me. Never since I had been a chimera, had I been dealt a physical blow such as that. And he hit me. I didn't know how to respond to that. Ignore it and try to talk to him? Mope some more? Or...bite him back? More than any of that...I wanted to break down sobbing like I used to when I was a little kid, sharing one bedroom with thirteen other girls at the orphanage.
The bat's knuckles had a few red smudges on them, duplicating the marks on his chest when he pressed his fingers against it, trying to control the trembling. “Leave me alone...” he rasped, turning away in shame, leaning his head against the cold, metallic floor. That didn't seem like a blind punch. How did he know where he was aiming...? “Leave me alone, damn you,” he repeated, eyes closing tightly as if that action could banish me from existence.
I knew I could no longer push the subject. It hurt, almost irreversibly hurt. So I retreated and withdrew into myself, my body going numb. A single thought bounced in my head: “Had I acted that that toward #201? Scared, in pain, not knowing what happened?” I couldn't remember anything from the first few days after the transmutation. I hung in the limbo of death. Later, I learned that I had nearly died when a bad case of acid reflux burned off the lining of my throat and infection set in, but Varinski was quick to put me on antibiotics. Some days, it really felt like the man cared. Other days, I knew he only did this was so he could “fix his mistakes” and make better chimeras. He said one time, to me, that he wanted to work his way to create one super powerful chimera that had the strength, cunning of an animal, but the full looks of a human. I didn't know if it was possible, but looking at Victor compared to myself... he was definitely improving. As long as that happened, more of us would die, more would be turned into creatures not fit to walk this earth.

And I could only hope that someone, something, would intervene and save us from this nightmare. I hope that it won't end like this.