Lost in the Dark

I can’t remember my name. My real name, anyway. I keep thinking that it’s Deathstryke, but who names their child Deathstryke?

I can’t even remember my parents.

My earliest memory is Will. He’s frequently told me that I’m the only one allowed to call him by his first name. I believe it; I mean, no one else does. To everyone else, he is “Stryker.” To me, he is Will.

I’ve seen how the other soldiers look at me. Their eyes crawl over me and eat me up. They pay more attention to my breasts and behind than anything else. I have overheard them talking about me.

“I’d give anything to tap that ass.”

“And she’s got a great set of tits on her.”

I hate it. It’s the most degrading thing in the world, hearing someone talking like that about you, but I can’t do anything about it. I’m capable; I could tear them all to shreds in a matter of minutes and not even break a sweat. But I can’t. Something inside me won’t let me do it, no matter how badly I want to.

It scares me, a lot, because they could rape me and I wouldn’t fight back. I wou wouldn’t be able to move or scream or even cry. I knew it would never happen; Will “needed” me. I was important, I was part of “the solution.”

“She needs to be sane,” he told them. “She needs to be able to think. I won’t let you traumatize her like that.”

I expected Will to rape me. After all, I was his. According to conversations I’d overheard, but didn’t really understand, he had found me and trained me. He owned me. He controlled me. I did exactly as he commanded without thinking twice or hesitating. He never even so much as looked at me.

I think he was married. He didn’t have a ring, but there was a photo of a blonde woman on his desk. She was wearing a dark green sweater and was smiling. It was in a plain silver frame. He rarely looked at it, and I soon saw why; the woman awakened emotion in him, and he always said that emotion was a weakness. That was probably why his soldiers never raped me; it would bring forth emotion in me, and that would cause weaknesses to form within me. That was Will’s explanation for it. It felt cold and practical.

I was not Will’s only mutant. He had one other, a German teleporter named Nightcrawler. I don’t think that was his real name either (who names their child Nightcrawler?), but I never found out his real name, or anything else about him.

He was a tall man, on the slender side, and incredibly flexible and agile. He was a trained acrobat, and teaching him martial arts was not difficult. He was fluent in French and German, in addition to English. And he was an illegal immigrant. That was how Will was able to get him; Nightcrawler had come to America a few years ago. He smuggled himself in – he snuck aboard an airplane full of German exports that was headed for Boston and managed to teleport out without being seen. Will found him purely by accident. He was an insomniac, he never sleepsd hed he happened to be vacationing in Boston. Late one night, at maybe two or three a.m., he went out for a walk and passed an abandoned church, where Nightcrawler happened to be living. He noticed Nightcrawler, then called in a team of soldiers to watch the place. They stood guard for seven months, stalking Nightcrawler and documenting his every move without him ever suspecting it, then they swooped in.

They were very clever about capturing him. They knew he was here illegally, and went in under the guise of U.N Officials who were investigating illegal immigrants. He could’ve escaped then and there, but they offered him a chance to get citizenship and he fell for it.

I’ve heard that I was captured, and I wonder sometimes if it was this easy.

Like me, Nightcrawler was part of “the solution.” He was trained to fight and was left unmolested by the soldiers, though they occasionally harassed him about his accent and his obsession with God. He was clearly here against his will and was able to vocalize it, unlike me. He prayed for a way to escape night and day.

There was one more prisoner, but I knew little about him. He did not “belong” to Will. He “belonged” to the soldiers. Will referred to him as their “toy.” He was apparently their captive for the better half of a month before escaping, and I only saw him once.

“He’s escaping,” Will shouted at me, “find him and kill him.”

I had never killed. I did not want to. I turned and darted towards the exit, following the sounds of footsteps and shouts. I wanted to stand up to Will, to look at him point blank and say, ‘hell no.’ I couldn’t. I couldn’t bring my soul to move my own body. Will was right; he’s managed to break me without raping me.

I heard the loud popping of gunshots and a choked cry. I practically tripped over the dead soldier before noticing the small dark figure racing in the opposite direction with a gun.

“Stop!” I shouted, leaping over the soldier, my claws extending. The figure spun around. He was on the small side, maybe five-three, and his skin was a mottled shade of green. He was dressed in black, and his clothing was torn. He aimed the gun at me and fired.

I was mid-stride when the bullets hit me, and I fell back. I’d never been shot before. Ever. I felt the harsh cold metal pass through my stomach and I heard myself scream. My claws retracted almost instantly, and my hands flew to my stomach, pressing themselves against the bloody wound. The pain was white-hot and intense, spiraling through me. I’m going into shock, I realized, I have to snap out of it.

I shut my eyes, keeping my hands against my stomach. I felt the wound move beneath my fingers. The edges were stretching, reaching for each other. They touched, and I felt the pain subside. My eyes flew open, and I tore the front of my uniform open in time to see the wound close entirely. Aside from the drying blood, there was no trace of it.

I heard myself screaming again, and Will was beside me, swearing loudly because the prisoner had escaped. “The plan” had to go into action now, a full two weeks ahead of schedule.

I was ordered to erase the prisoner’s file and all of the surveillance tapes from his cell. He had a real name; Mortimer Toynbee. He was five-two, and weighed a one-fifty. He was well-trained in martial arts and his tongue could extend; it was fifteen feet long. He was one of the top ten America’s most wanted – along with Erik Lehnsherr, Raven Darkholme, and Victor Creed.

I saw some of the tapes, and they made me want to cry. Naturally, I couldn’t do anything unless commanded to by Will, so I couldn’t cry. That’s the worst feeling in the world, needing to cry but being unable to. Mortimer Toynbee had been the soldiers’ “toy” all right. He was raped by them, probably more than fifty times, to say the very least. Nightcrawler had even raped him. I felt a sense of disgust rising in my stomach, and a distinct feeling of hate for Nightcrawler. How could he pray for escape when he beat and raped another man on an almost daily basis?

I did like I was told. I erased every tape and deleted every file. I was even part of the search party that went out looking for Mortimer Toynbee, though we never found him.

You’ll never know how glad I was that he managed to escape.