No. For one moment in
your life, just stop.
+ + + + + +
Steve inhaled deeply.
He rubbed his wrists again, feeling an aching tiredness settling into
his bones. He felt wasted and overdrawn,
sensations he had not known since before the change. He let the breath in his lungs go and it
escaped him too quick to be relaxing. It
smelled of the steak descending into his belly and he caught himself hoping
they were bringing more.
He ran a hand through the scraggly beard at his chin,
pulling through the crossed and knotted hairs.
His fingers twitched with a nervous energy as he looked around the
room. He had spent over sixty years of
his life on the run, in the wild, far from civilization and both its boons and
restrictions. The growing sense of
claustrophobia was new to him as well.
The click of the door handle turning made his hands flinch
into fists. He forced them open and
watched as the portal opened. He
expected operatives with restraints and weapons. He expected the leader in the
trenchcoat. He did not expect a middle
aged man in thick glasses and a labcoat, especially one that stood five four in
shoes and couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. The man carried a file and was reading it as
he entered. When he saw Steve, his head
cocked back in surprise, as if he weren’t expecting someone to be there.
The man pushed his glasses further up his nose and closed
the file. He looked Steve up and down
with a hint of disbelief, as if he expected someone to reveal this meeting to
be a strange joke.
“Wow,” he said with the tone of someone looking at a lab
specimen, “you’re…big.”
