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“Log date:______. Subject: Keter wir Galvus.”
The echo of footsteps, sounding in her ears. Impacts of the all too familiar scientist’s shoes against the hard metal floors of the lab.
She knew this one. His name, his family; perhaps even more than he did. Driven as he was by his maddened desire to learn, he no longer cared to reminisce, spare so much as a second thinking of days gone by. Loved ones all but forgotten in the wake of his passion for scientific discovery, along with any semblance of sympathy for the subjects of his research. Unimportant. Inconsequential.
But those memories… She remembers going through them, over and over. Every hug from a loved one. Every hint of praise from the teachers he so strove to please. Every success, every discovery that lit up his heart and eyes, when he was yet young and innocent. He was one of the happy ones, and for that she was grateful. It was easier to bear the suffering, to see the face of the one who causes it, when they bring such respite with them as well. The mutilation, be it needles, chemicals… incisions… can be ignored, with the memories of a happy childhood to take the edge off the suffering.
The man looks down on her form, laid out on the metal counter. All the scars, from incisions and injuries both, write the tale of her life across her skin. A tale she won’t try to hide. He has questions, and she has his answers, and if she gives them she can leave.
Sleeping in a stasis chamber. That’s what leaving meant, back when she knew him, years and years ago.
“Subject’s physical health has sustained itself remarkably well. Scars are fading faster than anticipated; some may one day disappear completely, much to my surprise.” A faint smile; a welcome turn of events it seems. She remembers the disappointment when the regeneration tests failed to live up to expectations… and has long since forgotten which of the many scars were the result.
“Visible musculature seems to have decreased from lack of further treatment, yet the remaining structure seem much more efficient. Good.” She remembers the faint traces of electricity they used to stimulate her. An alternative to letting her move on her own, a risky choice they weren’t willing to take. She supposes it was a wise decision. With all they had enhanced, it likely would have cost them their lives if she had lashed out.
The scientist walks around the table, assessing her. Stating all the ways she’s changed since the days when this was the only life she had left to know. It doesn’t matter. Those days are gone.
He looks her in the eyes now. That was never something he did; her eyes were never modified, and the glow of the Resonance was easy enough to observe from a distance. It takes her a moment, when he speaks, to realize he’s talking to her.
“You’re recovering.”
She stares for a time. Unresponsive, as she always was. But this is already wrong, she thinks, and so she speaks all the same. “You already said the scars were fading.”
“I don’t mean the scars, and I think you know that.” He smiles again, pleasantly surprised as before. His face, at least, has maintained its distant indifference. “You smile sometimes, now, don’t you? You eat, you bathe, you speak. You talk to people, perhaps not as much as some of them would wish, but far more than anyone dreamed you would again.” This is not how this goes. The man she sees would never, but that man is dead. That man was slaughtered when the Eorzean forces invaded the lab. He was dead long before the stasis pod’s euthanasia failed, and she writhed on the cold floor with poison in her veins until someone found her.
“...I do.” She doesn’t ask why he bothers, only confirms that the words are correct. Words are only spoken out of necessity, or when they matter. She knows these words are of no importance here, so she does not elaborate.
He continues to smile, giving no complaint to her response, short as it is. “You’ve exceeded the wildest expectations of everyone who matters, you know.” He turns away, entering information into a terminal as he speaks. “The ones you once called family are not among them, nor among the living. They are gone, and so are we.” He finishes his entry, turning back to look at her again. “The people of Eorzea, who took you in and taught you how to live and not simply survive, however…”
She waits for him to continue, but he does not. She knows how the sentence ends, of course… but he does not say it. She does not say it, either. Those words are memorized, but never learned; of course the people who saved her matter to her. It is a debt she will never be able to repay. But she cannot reconcile the rest - the idea that none of what she heard and went through mattered. If it did not matter, it would not hurt as much as it does.
“Ah well.” He picks up the recorder, audio log almost complete. “You will never forget us. And I suppose we would be proud of our work. Your survival is unprecedented, after all, and our legacy will live on in the scars we left behind, if nothing else. But you have your life, all for yourself now.”
“Go on, Keter.”
“Live.”
Later on, after she wakes up in her bed, the sunlight shining through her window and the leaves of the trees casting shadows across the floor of her bedroom, she will dress herself and leave for the forest. She will wander the verdant woods, a far cry from the frozen wastes of her homeland, until day turns to night and she must return to her borrowed home. She doesn’t want to worry the people who care for her. It would be a poor way to repay them for all they’ve done for her, even as a part of her aches to wander forever. And one day she will do exactly that. Leave to wander the world. Listen to others’ woes, and do her best to ease their burdens, whatever those burdens might be.
She is alive.
She will live.