Title: Together in the Dark

Warnings: Dark, violent, lab fic. AU.

Multi-chapter, ongoing.

He always recognized the tests. They experimented on him first, even for the new tests, assuming his form was more stable because he seemed larger and older. He doubted their theory; he was certainly better able to force himself to keep the ghost form, but that was weakness rather than strength. Even after all these months, he suspected Daniel's human form was in better shape. Daniel had certainly gotten more human food lately, and had learned how to keep himself from vomiting it up again afterwards. The cost of that food couldn't be thought of at any length.

This was one of the simpler tests, stunning in its calm cruelty. For him, it had not lasted so long. He was already theorizing in the back of his own mind about the reasons, suspecting it had to do with leaning more and more on the ghost form to survive. Daniel's own remaining humanity was what was punishing him. It was information their captors could not access due to their refusal to accept the dual nature of their prisoners. They'd never come to the same conclusions. Listening to their guesses was infuriating. Listening to Daniel was unbearable.

They'd put some sort of wide block behind Daniel's teeth, holding his tongue down. He hadn't been quite able to determine why he couldn't phase through it when he'd experienced it himself, but supposed it was some smaller form of the bindings they used to hold ghosts still. The purpose was obvious and two-fold, to keep the victim's mouth open if he threw up from the shock, and to keep him from being able to speak. It didn't silence them, of course. Daniel was making the most horrible noises now, long desperate moans that sounded as if they might well belong to a proper ghost.

He was still looking up at his arms in terrified anticipation, waiting for the next blow. If the monsters outside were to be trusted, this test had gone on for nearly three hours. Daniel's eyes were wide and unfocused, forcing tears and sweat out of the way with occasional short fits of blinking. His arms, bound up and above his head, looked almost normal again. After the third blow, he'd thrown up on himself, although the peculiar mix of green and brownish-red was dried across his front now. After the first hour, he'd started foaming at the mouth, a miserable and dehumanizing state that at least seemed to be cleaning his lips and chin a little.

Daniel was not looking in the right direction to really be forewarned. The watching man/ghost saw one of the scientists outside nod to another, and the control was pressed again with little fanfare. He could hear Daniel make a panicked choking noise as the device moved, but there was very little time to brace one's self between the device's movement and the pain.

Each of his arms took the blow solidly again, a simultaneous hit, knocking each arm crooked at the elbow. The dull crack was muffled by Daniel's agonized, hysterical howling. The boy's eyes had begun to roll back in his head again, no longer looking directly up at the source of torment. The man doubted the boy could force himself to levitate anymore. If he had been a normal human, he'd certainly have died of shock long before now. As it was, his arms took on an unhealthily dark green glow, looking distended and pulled down by the weight. It was not like internal bleeding, not quite, but it was a sign of the trauma and his body's desperate attempts to start knitting itself together again, in its own peculiar way.

When the experiments had started, he'd transformed back into a human at very little instigation. They both had. Over time, the human bodies grew too weak to support them. Now, he suspected that without a deliberate effort, neither of them would return to that state until they were exhausted enough that both sides were about to die. It would be a lovely surprise for those outside to see the human corpses they'd leave behind, he hoped. Even when the two of them were alone in their separate containment, even when he tried to comfort his fellow prisoner in the meager ways left to them, he didn't truly believe either of them would escape this. There was no real outside world in his mind any longer. The world was this room, with humans wandering in and out to observe through the glass like… well, like ghosts. If they didn't occasionally enter the containment units to adjust some sort of equipment, he'd have started suspecting humans didn't exist, either. Just an illusion seen through glowing glass.

The arms didn't have to hold a solid shape. The seeming bone was a result of the urge to believe themselves possessed of a human form. The blow was as much psychological as physical in torment, but to a ghost the two were intimately connected. A ghost's body was a reaction to the state of its mind and its environment. It took experimentation and effort to deliberately change one's own shape. An easier way to change a ghost was simply to show, with great force, some new reality and force the ghost into it. It had been easier for him, at least. It couldn't possibly have lasted this long. He'd have gone insane, and he knew that had come later.

The disgusting color was starting to fade a little, the arms taking on a more normal shape despite the strains on them. Daniel was mumbling something, perhaps no longer remembering that he couldn't quite talk, shaking his head slowly and staring up at them with the same horror of before. Naturally, he wanted them to stop healing to the form he thought arms should have. The attacks would end then. A handful of sobs shook his body, unrestrained, while he twisted slightly in his binds. The peculiar tail he tended to manifest flicked against the floor weakly, like a dying animal's last twitches.

As his struggles seemed to change from agony to fear, the men outside came to a decision and started the process yet again. Certainly a human boy would have gone mute by now, unable to scream anymore. Daniel's voice went higher, incoherent in trapped pain.

He wondered idly if the boy at least didn't recall where he was anymore, how long this had gone on. That sort of fugue was common, further into an experiment. It was a mixed blessing. You awoke from that shock spared some portion of memory of pain, but not sure quite how far you had been debased, losing grip on yourself. That sort of mental escape had cost him his name many years ago. He could scarcely recall who he'd been, before coming here. Every day, when their torturers were gone and the two of them were alone, he'd repeat the boy's name to him so he'd remember. Daniel. No last name, no sense in reminding him of his family. But a human name.

Finally, something was changing. He didn't suppose the boy was present enough to notice immediately, but the arms were still dangling limp from the blow, yet their color was still improving. The dark peach of his ghost form's skin, instead of mottled green bruises. And the seeming elbow, it was still nowhere to be seen. The effect would have been unsettling, if he hadn't seen these effects so many times before, but it certainly didn't look human. It was as if the boy's body were suspended by putty. Outside, the white-clad men were starting to chat excitedly.

The boy's face cleared a little, although under the stains of his torture it was hard to tell. He let out an odd, choked questioning noise as he looked up at himself, barely audible. He was starting to see it, too. Good. Whatever distaste Daniel might normally feel at seeing himself so inhuman would be dulled by the previous traumas, and he could realize this meant an end to the test. If nothing else, a change other than the distortions caused by the blows might distract his mind.

It wasn't altruism. He knew that. If he'd hated the boy to the deepest part of his core, hated him more than he hated the humans out there, he'd still have wanted him to hold on a little longer. Being alone so long in this place had utterly unmanned him. The idea of the boy leaving, through death or entirely self-absorbed madness, was more terrifying than anything those outside could do to him. He could not speak very well anymore, despite listening to the men outside, but he still treasured the halting conversations in the dark more than anything he could recall.

The bindings were released abruptly, as the ones outside were unconcerned with injuring a ghost simply by dropping him. The way the boy slumped to the ground was strange, limp beyond exhaustion, as if all of his bones had followed suit with the bones that instinctively vanished in his legs and the bones that had been trained to go fluid in his arms. Moaning helplessly, the boy started to curl up on himself in ways no human could, looking like a snake making a nest of itself, pulling himself tighter in to try to deny the world outside. He didn't react when the cage opened, and only whimpered pitifully as they freed his mouth, held him up and cleaned his front with a harsh spray of water. His body was strange under the outside forces, offering no resistance, bending in awkward ways with no obvious signs of discomfort beyond his exhaustion and burnt-out terror. When they dropped him to the floor, he curled up again in an unnatural pile and made soft, sad noises as they walked out to discuss their findings. Typically, they turned the lights off as they left, as if the room were now empty.

The darkness didn't bother him anymore. The darkness meant they were alone. The darkness was safety. He waited a few minutes more as Daniel's cries went on, letting the boy have some time to let out that pain and fear. But letting it go on too long was risky. It wasn't good to think about the experiments after they were over. You'd begin to think ahead, too, foreseeing the inevitable pain that would intrude on your world again. He had come to the understanding long ago that he could minimize his own misery when they weren't present, choose to simply forget what he was and where he was, what would happen when the lights came on again. For now they were safe, and that was all he could afford to acknowledge.

"Daniel." His voice was soft, affectionate. "Daniel, you need to come back now."

In response, he got a slightly louder moan, not quite a coherent denial. Of course he didn't want to pull himself out of his grief and agony. For years, the man had thought the same way. That if he let himself fall down low enough, eventually he'd die of that pain. He wasn't so fortunate, and he found his suffering continued while he still mourned over what had happened before. In the long run, giving up to that despair only made it worse.

"Daniel, you need to speak." He wouldn't give up. The boy was all he had. "Say something."

At first the terrible moans went on, but they began to take on a new tone, some change in his voice. He was coming back. Finally, the boy spoke, and the man was faint with relief. "I can't..."

"You can. It's over now. Now you're here with me." It also helped to pretend that the room when the lights were on and the room when the lights were off were different places. He'd long since gone half-mad from being trapped in the narrow tube, too narrow to stretch out his arms fully, far too narrow to sleep in any position but fetal. Years and years of the same room, the same tube, only the agony and the lights differing. At least in the dark he could imagine he was somehow transported, taken to a place outside of the room, some spot he half-remembered from his life as a human. Details faded, it was too painful to recall what he'd lost in full, but he tried to focus on his memories of the sky at night, to imagine that if he looked up he would see stars.

The boy had wanted to be an astronaut. When he'd first arrived, he'd told the man about his life outside, wonderful knowledge that had once been lost given back with the helpful distance of someone else's recollection. Daniel had said in all earnestness that he was a superhero. The foreign lunacy, so different from the man's own madness, was charming. "Keep talking, Daniel. Do you remember?"

There was another long pause, but the moaning had stopped. Finally, in a near whisper, he answered, "Yes. I'm Danny."

"You are. Where are you?" The question was soft and fond, not demanding. Daniel had come back.

Silence fell again, but the man was patient. They had no reason to rush. "Outside." It was another whisper, and less sincere than the earlier ones, as if he were giving the response that he knew was expected without really believing it. The man wasn't surprised Daniel went on to add, a bit louder, "But I'm not."

"You are." His own voice was confident. "Can you see?"

"No." Daniel's voice had dropped to a mumble again.

"Then you might be outside." He considered the darkness for a moment before adding, "Unless there's somewhere else you'd rather be?"

"Home. I want to go home."

"That's not an option," he interrupted, almost before Daniel had finished speaking. Some fantasies were too dangerous to entertain. He added, more gently, "Is there anywhere else?"

Daniel was quiet a long time before he answered, almost begrudgingly, "Sam's house."

Sam was one of his friends. Sam and Tucker. One was a girl and one was a boy, but both had boy's names and he had trouble remembering which was which. It wasn't really important, since he'd never meet them and Daniel would never see them again. "All right. Sam's house. The lights are off. What did you do today?"

"Played Doomed." Daniel's voice was growing a little stronger now, as he let himself be drawn into the fantasy. It didn't take long for their ghostly bodies to recover. That was why Daniel's pain had lasted so long. The man forced himself to stop thinking of that, it wouldn't help either of them to think about that.

"It's a video game," Daniel added helpfully.

"That sounds nice." He vaguely recalled the concept of video games, although he supposed they must be very different by now, years later. Years and years... "How do you play that?"

"Badly, compared to Sam." Daniel didn't laugh, but a touch of humor had entered his voice at the small joke. "I'm about even with Tucker. It's a first-person shooter..."

He listened to Daniel's description of the game, putting in polite questions to draw the conversation out even though he only understood a small fraction of what Daniel was talking about. "That sounds very fun."

"It is." Daniel paused, and the man was trying to think of some new topic when he said, "Maybe when we get out, I can show you how to play."

That was another fantasy that he'd long given up on, too painful to contemplate. He wasn't sure why he never tried to disabuse Daniel of the notion that either of them would leave this place, knowing that it was false hope. Maybe he wanted to feel that hope vicariously. It was rather selfish of him, but somehow it made him happy to hear Daniel speak of freedom with conviction, as though it were only a matter of time. "Thank you, Daniel. I'm sure I'll enjoy that."