[Book] Dreaming of Freedom
Maximum Ride based
by maximum_ride_004
Disclaimer: I don't own Maximum Ride.
Maximum Ride based
by maximum_ride_004
Disclaimer: I don't own Maximum Ride.
Okay. This isn't the full first chapter yet, but I wanted some input, and I also wanted to see how well I was doing before I decided to continue with this story.
Don't you hate it whenever you have a good dream, and then reality suddenly comes zipping back into focus, obliterating this wonderful dream of yours? Reality can do that often - shattering your hopes and dreams into little bitty pieces and forcing you to face the truth. Forcing you to accept the fact that it's impossible to live in your own fantasy world forever, despite any efforts you may take to try and change that. Well, that's what happened to me this morning.
My dream had been bright and vivid, as if I were really there. I had been up in the sky, above a raincloud. Down below me was the swirling, charging, dangerous black cloud that was pouring its contents onto the people even further down below. Above me it was completely clear; blue skies and a bright yellow sun, the outer edge of it so bright that it looked almost white. It was a picture perfect scene. I wished I could have continued up there forever, watching other birds fly past me in their own attempts to avoid going headlong into the storm. But then reality caught up to me. It's like I was pulled through the clouds, from my fantasy world, and onto the other side, to the storm.
That's what my life was like, one big storm. I get battered around, hurrying from one point in my life to the next, trying to avoid what life could throw at me and dreading what I'll find whenever the storm clears. Such is life to most people. It's unavoidable. As was my wakening.
As my dream slipped out of my grasp like water through my hands, I continued to lay on the soft grass where I had made my bed the previous night. I wasn't ready to wake up and face the day just yet. I wanted to lay there and try to call my dream back to me, to have it play in front of my eyes for just a couple minutes longer. I wanted to see the sunlight again, to be flying out of harm's way, to be where I made the decisions and called the shots and where I was safe.... But that image was quickly fading off into the distance, leaving me with my own imagination to compensate for it.
A very small amount of light showed from the other side of my eyelids; the skin was still fairly dark, but I could make out the faint lines of veins and arteries that crisscrossed in front of my eyes. Obviously, it still wasn't morning, technically. In my opinion, morning started when the sun crossed the horizon. It was still too early to be up, but my subconscious was urging me awake, drawing my fantasy world farther and farther away from my grasp, either through dreams or imagination.
Slowly, I forced myself awake. Sleep wouldn't be coming back to me until tonight; there was no use in trying for it beforehand. I could hear birds around me, singing their hearts out as the sun slowly crept closer to sight. There were a few small sounds in the grass and the surrounding trees; small animals just waking up, or those nocturnal ones who were going back to their homes for their own sleep. I found myself wishing to join them, just to make my fantasy world take control once more.
Eventually, I pried my eyes open and sat up, taking stock of my surroundings. The perfectly green grass I sat in was slightly damp with dew; I could see it glittering on the small stalks, and I could feel it under my hands. A small breeze bent the grass, and slid silently and gently past the yellow, blue, and purple wild flowers that dotted the clearing. A small ladybug crawled from one stalk to the next, and through the short blades of grass I saw an early morning procession of ants, carrying a few dead ones on their backs, probably towards their home.
Around me were trees, the trunks towering to reach heights of at least fifteen feet; some were bigger than that. There were a few saplings, right around the edge, fighting for their chance at sunlight and for their room to grow. Bushes also lined the clearing, plentiful in either bright red berries or vibrant flowers. Bees buzzed from flower to flower, getting the nector they needed to make their honey.
Straight ahead, right over the gently rustling leaves of the trees, the sun was rising. In that spot, the sky was stained with different shades of yellow, orange, and red. The clouds took on a rainbow-like appearance as the light was captured on their undersides. Behind me, the sky's color went from gray to light blue, to almost white as it reached the colorful sunrise.
My backpack lay on the ground, at the head of an imprint of my body. I had been using it as a pillow the night before. A rain coat lay in a heap over my legs, having fallen off of me whenever I had sat up to inspect my surroundings. I could see that my clothes were in need of a wash, and of some repair. My shoes, which had originally been white, were now brown and green, stained with dirt and grass from my wanderings. My jeans were torn in numerous places, and the knees were missing from constant falls. My shirt was grimy and gave off a slight stink. The black showed less stains on it, though it also got hotter.
There was a reason behind all this. Behind my appearance, behind my sleeping place, and behind my dream even. I was an outcast from society, shunned away from everything that you would hold dear. My family abandoned me; my friends left without explanation. The owners of buildings that sheltered the homeless bundled me out of there as soon as they could. No one would talk to me; I was avoided like the plague. So I stopped caring, and started up my own way of living, away from society. All this because I was so much different than anyone else.
Unfortunately, I couldn't help being different. What people were scared of was something I was born with. Like how you can't change your height or natural hair or eye color, I can't change the appearance that I was born with either. It frightened people enough that I was almost killed. But that I was used to.
A lot of you may complain about having a poor childhood. Maybe because your parents died or got divorced; maybe because you became a forgotten child in your family after the birth of a new sibling; maybe it's because you were abused as a child. But I'm sorry to say, none of those is as bad as my childhood. During my childhood, I was treated like an animal. A common, every day animal - nothing more, and nothing less. Actually, I was treated like less. Animals at least got food, water, shelter, and chances to shape their own lives and stay alive. I didn't get that even.
Most people would say that I wasn't born, but created. In actuality, I was born, but sometimes it doesn't feel like it. I was born like you and anyone else you know. I had parents, I even had a couple of older siblings. But that's where similarities between my childhood and any other kid's ends. My parents gave me and my brothers away for easy money. They willingly gave up their three children for a million dollars. Answer me this: If you were given a million dollars, and told to give up your children in exchange, would you do it? Would you risk your children's lives, just to have money? Would you give up what made you happy, just so that you could get a few nice things to replace what you had just given away? No, I didn't think so. But my parents did.
I don't even remember my brothers. I was only a baby whenever my parents sold me for their large lump of cash, and after that they were separated from me; I don't even know their names, or what happened to them. All I know is what happened to me. Though my brothers probably had the same thing happen to them.
As it was explained to me, when I was born I was given a few injections. Most of them were standard things that hospitals gave to little children, but one wasn't. This one injection held the DNA of a golden eagle, and the DNA merged with my own. Over time, changes began to occur. I rapidly started to lose weight, and not because of under eating. Rather, it was because my bones were hollowing out, becoming much more light-weight. Air sacs started to grow right underneath my lungs, so that I could hold more air at one time. Wings started to grow from either side of my spine, starting out as goofy chicken-like wings, and then slowly growing bigger and taking shape as I grew.
The people that I had been sold to kept me locked up in a cage like a naughty dog. I was never allowed out to wander around on my own; I always had to have some kind of supervision, even in the bathroom. The people, the scientists, were afraid of one of their human experiments running away and developing a mind of its own. What's more dangerous than a lab experiment with its own thoughts and nothing to lose? What's more dangerous than a lab experiment that can formulate its own plots for revenge and go through with them without a moment's hesitation? For them, nothing was worse.
For thirteen years of my life I put up with the scientists. Throughout my childhood, and into my teenage years, I was treated like an object, like a prize to be won, or like a trophy that someone proudly displayed. I was often tested on, and I didn't have a choice in the matter. Then again, why give your experiment a choice in the matter? Would you ask a frog for permission before dissecting it? Would you ask a test tube permission before filling it up with vile liquid? No, you wouldn't. So I'm not surprised that I wasn't given a choice in what happened to me.
The scientists didn't show any mercy. I ran for extended periods of time - normally hours - and my only reward for doing good was to not get burnt with an electrical cattle rod that they had for if an experiment slowed down or didn't obey commands. I had to run mazes, the walls towering above me and making me feel like an ant running through blades of grass, like in my clearing. The floor was rigged to burn my feet if I slowed down even the smallest amount, so I often had burn marks littering the soles of my feet after each of these. There were also a multitude of fights, most of which were very unkind matches. They were normally twenty on one, or sometimes the number even excelled twenty - the most had been two hundred on one, and that match had lasted five seconds before I had lost consciousness from the huge beating I had recieved. They helped perfect my fighting skills however. If the scientists were smart, they would take that out of the agenda. On the one hand, they could have weak, defenseless, pitiful experiments who would be much easier to control and to convince of the right way to go; on the other, they could have experiments with fighting spirits and a good sense of right and wrong. It gave them a disadvantage.
There were some other tests as well - the scientists just couldn't be happy with what they had already accomplished. I think knowing that they put effort into torturing an experiment was their own personal reward. They are very messed up people, so this idea isn't as absured as it may seem. The idea is probably hard to grasp for those of you reading this who have probably never experienced real evil before, but there are people such as the scientists (obviously, because I'm telling you about them) in the world.
These other tests were fairly easy, though they were all just as bad as the others, and made one just as miserable as any other test that the scientists could cook up. Some of them were easy, but annoyingly repetative. Blood was often drawn, and most experiments had a plastic shunt on the backs of their hands to make drawing blood easier for the scientists. I had one of those devices, though it didn't make drawing blood any easier for them; the shut would often suddenly be the cause of a broken nose, for reasons unknown, or the reason for a broken needle. But other tests were things like taking a part of the mutation - in my case, a feather - and running DNA tests and all sorts of odd-ball tests on it that would probably only make sense to a medical veteran; I sure as heck didn't know what the scientists were doing, but then again, that wasn't saying much.
