Chapter Text
We were ready to track down anyone who tried to run. So when we tracked this one down in Penn Station we weren’t expecting much from him. We didn’t think much of this scientist. Only that he was branded a threat. The CO said he was the most likely to expose our operations. We didn’t know what he could be packing. So when we did corner him, he pulled something out. A test tube of sorts. It had the virus in it. We knew exactly who he was, and exactly what virus was in it.
“Put down the vial and back away.”
“Just let me go and I’ll do just that.”
“Sir, this is your last warning or we will fire. Please, put down the vial.”
“Put it down? Ok. I’ll put it down.”
The next few seconds were a blur. He… he threw the vial down. The glass shattered and I… one of my men, he… he lost his nerve. We weren’t expecting this kind of situation. None of us expected the bastard to not actually be bluffing. So we fired on him to prove we weren’t bluffing either.
He was dead and we dragged his body out of there in a biohazard bag. The whole place was cleaned up and there were no witnesses to his death.
But that bastard… he started something. Call it a gut feeling. But if I were him, I’d count myself lucky to be dead. With what followed, he’s lucky to be six feet under.
~
He awoke to a void. Actually, awake wasn’t the right word. He couldn’t move, see, talk, anything. All that he could do was feel this searing hot pain. The pain was all he could remember. Everything else was gone. Memories, identity, everything. Everything was gone. He knew they were once there, under all the pain. It was a feeling. Not the pain consuming his body type of feeling, but something else… like an instinctual feeling.
He—that is, if he was even a he—spent what seemed like an eternity writhing in pain. He wanted to scream and cry out for someone, anyone to put him out of his misery. As time slowly dragged on, he began to detect the origin of his suffering—an area towards the center of his being. It seemed to tear away at him, ripping razor sharp claws through what he could only assume was his body.
Then finally a new stimulus entered his world. Sound. More than sound, voices. They were broken and difficult to make sense of, but he listened in hopes that he could forget the pain.
“…knew…he was Blacklight.”
“Yeah… now… ex-Blacklight.” Blacklight? What was that?
“His name… Mercer, Alex J. …kin, Mercer, Dana A.” Alex? Was that his name? Alex Mercer… he liked that. He had a name now. “Is that…”
“I don’t know…” The voices started to become clearer.
“”Do you think… has to do with… Subject on 51?” Subject? 51? Where the hell was he?
“I don’t know. Even more, I don’t want to know. Just give me the eight-inch blade.” Blade? “We’ll start by going through the torso.”
What?! No! Let me go! I’m not dead! He forced all his efforts forward. I am not going to be cut up!
All of his senses exploded. He was no longer trapped in the void, but the light was blaring. Some old instinct rushed to him. Air! I need air! He gasped for breath, he could taste blood on the air and something that made him feel uneasy. The sterile smell, the cold room, and the taste of what he could only describe as death on the air. A word rose up to his mind from nowhere. Morgue…
The two who were standing before him were equally as shocked as he was, but likely for other reasons.
Alex—or at least that was the name he was going to stick to unless he was proven otherwise—rolled off of whatever he was on. His legs were not ready for the weight and his knees buckled, forcing him to cling to whatever he just rolled off of for support.
“Get the fuck out!” One screamed.
“Get the kill team in here!”
“Hey! Wait!” He had so many questions, but the two were already long gone, leaving Alex alone.
He managed to pull himself to his feet and maintain his balance. It felt natural to him. At least he remembered how to operate like a functional person, for the most part. He still felt the pain in his chest, and began to stagger. He looked around for a moment and caught sight of a clipboard. He picked it up a read it aloud.
“Alexander Mercer… born July 16, 1979, American, brown hair, blue eyes, 5’10, Head Researcher of Gentek Special Project, and… one known relative, Dana Mercer.” He scanned over the clipboard again, but there was nothing more to it. Dana, huh? Sounds like a nice girl.
He walked over to the first reflective object, a metal tray, he could find and inspected his appearance. Just as the clipboard said, he had the blue eyes. He picked up the clipboard again and compares his appearance to the photo attached. Besides the warping of the tray, his reflection matched the photo.
He put down the tray and began half walking, half dragging himself to the exit he saw the two escape out through. The hallways seemed eerily empty. Where was everyone? He didn’t have time to wonder about that and frantically began looking around. He didn’t have to be completely coherent to find the bright, glowing exit sign above a door that lead to the stairs. He barely keeps his balance enough to make it up two flights of stairs before half collapsing at a landing. He looks up and the sign designated it to be the ground floor.
Alex staggered out of the lobby and into the open air. Outside of the building, the air was brisk and sharp. Early winter, by his estimate, but that meant nothing at the moment. He ran at full speed—which wasn’t that fast for someone as injured and disoriented as he was—and hid behind a truck. The area surrounding the building looked caged in, and he had no time to run elsewhere. He could hear something above him beating at the air. A helicopter had landed in the lot and several soldiers had exited from it. Against all logic and his better judgement, Alex looked around the corner of the truck and watched.
The two from the morgue began to frantically try to explain the situation. But these soldiers, they weren’t taking it well. They must have said something wrong because one soldier shot one of the two, while another soldier gunned down the other.
The loud noise startled Alex, and he must’ve made some sort of clamor because the soldiers figured out where he was and they turned toward him.
“Aw, shit…” He ran for what looked like an exit but they already cornered him.
“W-wait, wait!” Alex desperately tried to protest, but his words did nothing to help. Like the two before, the soldiers fired on him as well.
Alex cried out in pain and collapsed to his knees. But, he wasn’t dead. He should’ve been. They fired twice as many bullets into him, tearing flesh and bone, yet, he was still alive. Not even seconds after they had fired on him, the pain was replaced with something else. He could feel where the bullets had been fired almost disappear, and whatever bones had been shattered reformed and relocated themselves. But the pain still lingered.
“What’s happening to me?!” The kill team seemed as shocked as he was.
Alex took the opportunity to run for the nearby wall. If I can get on that dumpster, maybe I can climb that fence.
He misjudged his jump and managed to miss the dumpster entirely and instead of jumping onto it, he jumped over it. In fact, he completely cleared the wall as well. He lands hard on the concrete below. It cracks and caves to the force, almost fragile underneath of him.
“That was… easy.” He mused. He didn’t have a moment to bask in his feat, the pain came rushing back and he flinched. “I need to get the fuck outta here. I can’t keep this up forever…”
Alex looked around, trying to get an idea of where he was. There was some kind of street, but which one, he didn’t know, or care. There was a gate between him and freedom. He mustered what strength he could and leapt over it with ease.
His plan was to start blending in but that wasn’t going to happen. A helicopter flew over and immediately locked onto him. So much for that plan. He puts the same strength he had into the jump and sprinted down the street.
The buildings rushed by at impossible rates. He was going at forty, maybe even fifty miles per hour. He was so caught up in his new found speed he didn’t notice the incoming wall.
“Fuck!” He was no physics major, but it didn’t take much to know he was going to crash. In a desperate attempt to save himself, he pushed off the ground and jumped. He hoped that his jump would have been enough to get him close enough to a window sill to grab onto, but he just barely missed it.
“Son of a bitch!” He desperately scrambled for any kind of traction, but something else happened. Rather than desperately flailing, he was still running. He was running, up the side of a building—a completely sheer, vertical surface—as if it were a perfectly horizontal surface.
Holy fuck. How is this even happening?! He swiftly pushed the thought out of his mind. No, I don’t have time to think about that. They’re still after me, and they still want me dead.
He reached the top of the building and more or less flips over the edge with a less-than-graceful landing.
Okay, I think I should rest here for a bit and catch my breath… His thoughts were then so rudely interrupted by gunfire raining down on him. Never mind.
The rooftops were clearly not safe for him, so instead he slid—half clinging to the wall—back down to ground level and sprinted away.
His speed definitely helped keep him a safe distance from the helicopters in hot pursuit of him, but his injuries were beginning to hinder him again and slow him down.
The moment he thought he was a safe distance away from them, they fired a missile at him. Technically not at him, but near him. The explosion knocked him off his feet and several objects flying.
“Shit!” Alex managed to recover, but a taxi was about to land right where he recovered. Alex did what any normal person would do, and throws his arms up in a defensive reflex. Unlike a normal person, he somehow manages to catch it. It was surprisingly light to him.
“What’re you gonna throw at me next, huh? What do you want from me?!” He shouted angrily at the helicopter. He got no response. Instead, it began to deploy soldiers. Are you fucking kidding me? Out of rage, he threw the taxi in the general direction of the helicopter, in an attempt to hopefully intimidate it. Once again, physics stood only to screw him over and he misjudged his strength. The taxi did not miss the helicopter, but instead it hit it. Both it and the taxi burst into a fiery explosion.
Alex blinked in disbelief, “I can’t believe what I just did.”
Alex made a mad dash to get as far away from the soldiers before they recover.
I should get up higher. Get a better vantage point. Maybe get a feel for where I am… He skid to a stop and quickly glanced around. Some business tower or whatever or whatever it was seemed tall enough. He raced up the side, and landed in his (still) less-than-graceful manner. And, of course, there were another two helicopters hot on his tail.
“Now I gotta kill them too…” He half groaned. And no cars up here.
The first one aimed a missile at him, to which he dove behind an air conditioner unit. The missile knocked the unit loose, but Alex was completely fine.
Wait. If I can throw cars, who says I can’t throw these things? He grabbed the unit, ripping it from it’s base and threw it at one of the helicopters. It hit it’s mark and the helicopter burst into a massive fireball and crashed below Alex’s line of sight.
Alex wasted no time and jumped to another unit and threw it at the other helicopter. As the other spiraled down, he couldn’t help but stare in shock. “This can’t be happening.”
He glanced around. It seemed like whoever the kill team is—or was now—wanted him dead at all costs. “I wonder why.” He grumbled to himself, tone sharp with sarcasm.
Alex checked his surroundings again. “Gotta get the fuck outta here…” He didn’t see an easy way down from the building except…
“No way. I am not jumping.” Alex stepped back from the ledge. He turned back again, and another kill team was beginning to close in on him.
“Well, I tried. Points for trying?” He took a step off the ledge and let gravity do the rest.
The ground approached much faster than he would have liked, and he hit the concrete below, hard.
“Ow…” The fall—despite being from several stories up—had not killed him. It certainly did hurt, and landing on his back hadn’t helped, but he wasn’t dead. Maybe I don’t have to worry about physical limitations? If that’s the case, maybe I shouldn’t land on my back next time…
Alex forced himself to his feet only to fall victim to gravity once more. There was no chance he could run now. If he had physical limits, he found his. He surveyed the area quickly and found a small alley across the street that seemed to be well enough out of sight. He pulled his strength once more, barely managing to remain standing this time and slowly staggered his way over towards the alley. By some miracle, he managed to get himself as far back as he could, well out of view.
Just need to catch my breath… just gonna… sit down… It didn’t take long for him to fall asleep.