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Alfred F. Jones woke up with his back pressed to a hard steel plate. He groaned and tried to lift a hand to his aching head, but was interrupted barely an inch later when his wrist caught on something.
A jolt of panic shot through Alfred. He yanked the chain hard, expecting it to shatter under his strength, but his strength had abandoned him, and the chain held firm.
Panic gripped his chest. He yanked again, to no avail. It was starting to get hard to breathe; half of him wanted to believe this was a dream, while the other half was growing increasingly more convinced that it wasn’t.
A fourth yank sent a shock of pain through his nervous system when the sharp edge of the cuff dug a trench in his wrist, and the panic grew stronger. The hope that this was a dream slowly slipped away. Pain was not a normal dream sensation, even for nightmares.
He glanced around the room wildly. It looked like a hospital room of some sort, but if so, it was one shitty hospital; the tiles were cracked and moldy, water stains crept through the walls like infections, and the lights looked like the bulbs hadn’t been changed since…a long time. A very long time.
The sound of a door opening snapped his attention elsewhere. It was followed by sound of footsteps.
“Ah, you’re awake. A pity.”
Alfred turned his gaze towards the voice. He had to squint to see, and tried to raise a hand to shield his eyes before the cuffs stopped him.
There was a figure standing in the doorway, hidden by the bright lights of the corridor behind them. Their voice sounded…female? Yeah, female, and with an accent. English or Australian, maybe.
The figure approached, pushing some sort of cart in front of her as she went. The door closed behind her, and once his eyes adjusted to the dimmer lights again, he finally got a good look at her.
She was around 5’8, and he didn’t hear the sharp crack of high heels as she approached, so that was probably her actual height. She wore clean, light-blue scrubs with a conspicuously absent name badge. A surgeon’s mask and hairnet hid most of her face and her hair, although he could tell it was dark; but he could see her eyes, curious and completely devoid of empathy.
He got a glimpse of the cart too, and his heart sank as he slowly took in what was on it.
The woman followed his gaze; when he turned it back to her, her expression hadn’t changed.
“ Why? ” he rasped, wincing at how gravelly his voice sounded.
The woman inclined her head slightly.
“I’ve seen what your kind can do,” she said, reaching for a folded plastic case on the cart. “I used to be an army doctor before I got sick of watching so much suffering happen all around me. I watched my own Nationkind get eviscerated by gunfire, only for him to get up and walk around a few days later like nothing had happened.”
She unfolded the case. He could see the ominous glint of metal tools held in place by rubber bands.
“I couldn't experiment on him, of course - the same curse that keeps you from hurting us goes both ways, it seems - but I was able to study him from a distance.”
She drew a scalpel from the case. Her hands were unnervingly still, her voice unwaveringly calm.
“You have a fascinating ability to regenerate from anything thrown your way,” she said. “Most cells are bound by a limit that keeps them from reproducing too many times-”
“The Hayflick limit,” Alfred mumbled.
The woman stiffened a little; surprised, maybe? “You know it?”
“Believe it or not, you’re not the only one who studied cell biology,” Alfred muttered.
“Then you know that human stem cells are rather restricted in what they can and cannot recreate. But you…”
She gestured at him with the scalpel, and he shuddered. He saw the corners of her eyes crinkle at his reaction.
“ You can regrow a lost limb in a day, a lost organ in less. You can heal from a stab wound in minutes and a gunshot wound in hours. And, more than anything, you can come back from total brain and cell death.”
She sidled up alongside Alfred. Alfred flinched and squeezed his eyes shut, clenching his fists until his palms stung.
“But, most interesting of all, I’ve found that your biology is so remarkably similar to humans that our bodies will willingly accept blood cells from you with no consequences. Which makes me wonder if the same can be said about your organs.”
She rolled up his shirt and tapped the scalpel on his stomach. Alfred yelped and jerked away.
“Don’t touch me!”
“Why not?” the woman asked. Her voice was laced with curiosity, which was paradoxically more frightening than mockery.
“You-you wouldn’t steal organs from a human, would you?!”
“No, I wouldn’t,” the woman agreed. “But you’re not human.”
Dread pooled in Alfred’s stomach, cold and clear as ice. The woman pressed the scalpel to a spot just below his sternum and held it there. Maybe she was thinking. Maybe she was relishing in the moment. Maybe she just wanted to savor the look of abject terror in Alfred’s eyes.
Then she pushed the blade down, and it sank through his skin like butter, so fast that he didn’t notice the pain until the knife was halfway down his stomach.
“Al!”
The door gave way easily under Matthew’s touch. He might not be a match for Alfred, but he was still pretty damn strong, especially hyped up on nerves and emotion.
Matthew tromped inside, hunting rifle in hand. His gaze darted around the empty hospital building.
The interesting thing about Nationkind was that if you took one from their land by force, it’d bring disaster for everyone involved. The interesting thing about Nationkind twins, though, was that if you took one to the other sibling’s land by force, you’d face no consequences, as if you’d never crossed borders in the first place.
This place was in Matthew’s territory, which was part of what had made it so damnably hard to find. They’d all naturally expected that Alfred was being held somewhere in his territory, but it hadn’t even occurred to Matthew that they could’ve taken him to Canada until Matthias of all people brought it up.
“Yeah, I was kidnapped by Geats once back in the Viking Age, and they dragged me to Sve’s territory to keep anyone from noticin’. Well, anyone except Ber, of course; he showed up at their doorstep and torched the place, and said the only person allowed to kill me is him.”
The idea had hit Matthew like a sledgehammer. He’d immediately grabbed his coat and hunting rifle and bolted out the door without another word, with a very confused Matthias and a very cross Arthur tailing after him. He’d been on the search ever since, slowly picking up traces and leads until he finally managed to track them all back to this place. He had no intentions to leave it empty-handed.
This was an old mining town that closed down when the iron ran dry. Before, it had been booming, which was probably why the hospital was so big for such an empty place.
A thin, faint coil of something caught his attention, like a stronger version of the connection he felt around his people. He followed it, deeper and deeper into the building, until he reached what used to be the psych ward. The sight of the place sent a chill down his spine, but at the same time made him want to laugh because of course . If you had a way to neutralize Nationkind’s powers, then the place had everything else you’d need to hold someone captive for an extended length of time.
Matthew pushed through the common areas and rooms and into the maximum-security ward. All but one of the iron doors lining the hall was open.
Matthew marched right up to that door and kicked it down. It took more effort than the one he’d broken to get in here, but even it couldn't stand in his way for long. The door fell inward, revealing a dark, musty, cramped cell with padded walls and a grate in the floor. Matthew brought a hand up to cover his nose with a sleeve, recoiling from the smell; when his vision finally adjusted to the darkness, he saw a small figure huddled against the far wall, curled up in a tight ball and unresponsive to his presence.
“Al?” Matthew called.
The figure glanced up, just a little, enough for him to catch a glimpse of a familiar blue eye. The tentative string he’d been following was at both its strongest and its end here. Relief flooded through him. Forgetting the first rule of ending up in a situation like this - never let your guard down - he scurried over to his brother and dropped to his knees. He grabbed Alfred by the shoulders and shook him.
“Al. Al! It’s me!”
Alfred whimpered and curled up a little tighter. Matthew frowned; odd.
He called forth the string again and reached for his brother’s face. He gently pried his fingers under Alfred’s chin and tilted his head up until their eyes met. Recognition finally flashed in Alfred’s eyes, and Matthew smiled, half in comfort and half in relief.
Alfred looked horrible . Admittedly, Matthew had expected to find him in shoddy condition, considering he’d been gone for at least three months by now, but he looked more wraithlike than Matthew had ever seen him. His eyes had sunken into his skull, his hair was greasy and overgrown, and he’d started growing in a beard; the scraggly, brittle condition of the latter two made Matthew suspect Alfred wasn't being fed enough by his captors, if at all. His skin and clothes were stained with a crusty brown substance he recognized on sight.
“Oh, Al…” Matthew whispered.
He threw his arms around his twin’s neck. Alfred stiffened, then slowly returned the hug.
“...Mattie…?” he asked. His voice was scratchy and hoarse; not like he hadn’t used it enough, but like he’d used it too much.
“Yes. Yes! It’s me!”
Matthew pulled away, still gripping his brother’s shoulders. “We need to get out of here.”
He scrambled to his feet, picking up his rifle. He offered a hand to Alfred, who just recoiled.
“What’s wrong?” Matthew asked.
Alfred shook his head and curled up again. Matthew frowned and knelt down.
“Whatever it is, it’s okay-”
Alfred rolled up his shirt. Matthew gasped.
The entirety of his brother’s torso was covered in thin, pale scratch marks, the kind of scar tissue that only built up in their kind from the same injury being repeated over and over and over again. The newest one was still weeping, sewn together hastily and carelessly with black thread.
“She…she takes me out…every morning and…and takes what she wants,” Alfred whispered.
“She? Who’s ‘she’?” Matthew asked.
A shadow fell across the floor. Matthew noticed it a heartbeat too late. He turned around to look just in time to catch a baton to the temple, knocking him to the floor. His head spun; he could feel the skin over his temple slowly knitting itself back together, but the cracked bone and agitated brain matter were a different story.
Footsteps. He was flipped over onto his back, and the looming silhouette of a woman dressed in clean surgeon’s scrubs filled his vision.
“Today’s my lucky day,” she said with an ominous chuckle.
Before Matthew could even process those words, she slashed the baton against his head again, ripping open the skin again and fading his surroundings into shadow.
Hey, Papa. It’s Mathieu. Knowing you, it’ll take you a few months to actually check your voicemails and hear this, but I think I know where Alfred went…