Chapter Text
It’s a unique torture. Hax wakes up in a small, sterile room of barely five steps from one end to another, body aching, feeling the cold for the first time in a way he’s never thought of before.
It’s cold. A new definition of the word asserts itself with foreign intrusion; Hax doesn’t get cold, but he’s cold. He’s so cold. It’s opening a door to your own house and being crushed by an avalanche. It’s waking up in the morning and discovering you’ve never been able to see. It's a Kafka-esque metamorphosis from man to cricket but rather Hax - the natural disaster, the infamous villain, Frostbite who Does Not Fear The Snow - to the common man who shivers from the cold.
The slither of skin visible of his wrist is a sickly, paling white, the rest of his hands are covered by an equally white metal husk, recognisable as power suppressors. Is this what people feel when he’s nearby? This mind-numbing frost. The metal, when he tries to map it out with the pads of his fingers sting on his skin in sheer cold, he’s only getting colder.
He instinctively brings his shoulders up towards his head, curling inwards as a gesture against the biting frost, and stops when his clavicle bumps awkwardly against a solid object.
Hax swallows.
And the bob of his Adam's apple is swallowed by the thick metal band around his throat. None of the edges smoothed out, so it awkwardly chaffs into the flesh of his shoulders when he brings them up higher wildly. It’s a heavy weight he hadn’t been aware of, and wishes he never did.
The cuffs wrapped around both hands keep them together with inescapable rigidity, but otherwise he has free range of motion to be anywhere in the room as far as he’s aware. He brings both his hands up to touch the collar, and winces when the two metal objects clink unremarkably. He runs the cuffs around the clean edge of the collar without thought, gazing around the room.
It’s familiar. Hax almost finds it in himself to grin. Familiar like a broken rib, like a cigarette burn.
The old Laboratory was a crucible which forged him from unknown injections and fiery training into who he is today. It burnt away the withering remains of his empathy, taught him to be the one that hurts rather than be hurt. It had sharpened his violence and vengeance.
And despite all the ways of which Hax was grateful for it, he would never, ever return.
Or so he’d thought, after turning the last one into winter wonderland, there wouldn’t be another.
It’s a little difficult getting up on both feet when his hands are tied, but he needed to move. His body aches and every muscle and ligament whines in sore tones when he takes the first step, but he doesn’t stop. Soon, he’s pacing around the square box with the intensity of a caged predator, or the boredom of a restless man.
Hax knows an old saying, or maybe it’s not a saying at all, but the fact is this: Despite all that may seem, all men die just as easily.
Hax knows with certainty the manner of which his death is predetermined to be messy, out-of-grace and insignificant. For a villain like him, who kills because he cannot imagine a life otherwise, who does it for the thrill and rush and satisfaction—to fuel his own heart with joy—he does not deserve a pleasant death. But, he wants it to be out under the sun.
The cell stank of sterility and lime. Time dripped in fragments- a meal or two shoved into the white box of his cell somewhere in time with his pacing. He didn’t touch the white plates, nor the sad looking bowl of porridge—the number suspect for holding all sorts of weird and unfortunate drugs. Hours bled into units of time Hax tracked first by counting the seconds, but when that fails to hold his attention, he swaps to minutes instead.
It’s just as painful as the seconds. Hax resorts to belting out every song he remembers properly, then backwards, then every song he doesn’t know, making up lyrics along the way.
On the fifth rendition of Let it go, a rather embarrassing moment where he realised he didn’t know the full lyrics of quite literally his theme song of sorts, Hax notices the quiet, indistinct blinking of a camera on one of the corners of the room. It hadn’t been active before, but now it was.
The red light beat steadily in his newfound silence, and despite knowing it to be the best time for a possible escape—Hax isn’t weak without his ice, he relies on it often, sure, but that didn’t mark him incapable—he tastes the chloroform in the air in sweet wisps, and then he’s gone.
.
Hax wakes up in the room, strapped to an office chair of nothing noteworthy except for the way his hands are contorted behind his back and still wrapped in cold metal.
There’s nothing in his field of vision but the sterile countertops, painfully familiar. A small creak and the click of a door unlatching reverberates, just out of sight. The door closes.
Hax meets eyes with a dead man.
“You’re dead.”
Nerdi looks just as he did however many years ago it must’ve been. Same easygoing smile, the detached eyes he remembers in the worst of days when everything tastes like blood.
“You must have missed one.” The scientist, the one from all the way back, says with saccharine voice. “It’s a shame.”
“I killed you. You’re dead.” Hax’s hands are cold, they were cold back then even if he couldn’t feel it then. “No one survived from there, I made sure of it.”
“Not sure enough.” Nerdi says in singsong. And it must be fake, because no man can be immortal and Nerdi has not aged a day in his memories.
“What are you?” Hax laughs now, lined with real hysteria. Icy eyes widening, unprotected by the familiar frost and so black under the white lights. “You’re unreal, you look the exact same and everything, where did you even come from?”
“That’s besides the point, I’m glad to see you again, little Blizzard, after so long.” Nerdi replies, walking closer; one hand on a navy clipboard and the other reaching for his pockets.
“I like to go by Frostbite these days.”
When Nerdi smiles, it is an ugly, cruel thing. “Well, there’s not much bite to you at the moment, is there?”
He takes out a long glass probe from his pocket, the kind you use to stir chemicals in beakers. It's mostly a harmless thing, and Hax had long trained himself out of flinching at an average, none-human-experimental item in his civilian life, and so he doesn’t bat an eye.
It's not the glass probe that had conditioned him to fear when he was younger, it was what followed after.
At a gentle poke against the left side of his throat, Hax forcibly relaxes his shoulders and every muscle which had inevitably tensed.
“You set back a lot of my progress,” Nerdi says absentmindedly, eyes tracking each twitch of his muscle. The neck, his arms, cheek, head, chest. It's the sensation of which he could now recognise as intimately dehumanising, to be prodded and poked at as if an animal. “I had to work from the ground up, it was a good thing HBG decided my work was worth it.”
“You built another underground laboratory?” He raises a brow, suppressing another flinch as the cold glass poked more harshly against the inside of his wrists. “That’s so cliche, where is it?”
“Don’t worry about it.” Nerdi says. “Shouldn’t you reflect on what you did to my old job more? You’re completely heartless, you know that right? Though, I guess that checks out with your eventual villainy.”
The memories come to him as summaries rather than visual imagery. Something that happened, rather than something he started and actioned out. It happened too long ago to fully remember, the moments yellowing and peeling away.
What did you want him to say?
Yes, Hax escaped the lab. Yes, Hax destroyed the whole building. Yes, Hax killed the children he was in the lab with.
Do you even know what it means? Staring down at that winter wonderland, staring at the carnage of small bodies piled on top of each other, his own hands still just as small but bloodstained. Their grotesque scarring covering their bodies, missing body parts, missing things. It was a kindness. It was a kindness.
It was the middle of an endless green plateau of fields, and it must’ve been in some rural, faraway farm. Looking from the surface you would have never known there were rows upon rows of a labyrinthine prison just underneath, built for the misfortuned and suffering.
Hax had stood in that endlessly green field, crawled up from the unforgiving dirt with cold hands and bare feet, nothing but the issue white shirt and pants. Behind him the site of an explosion, or what could have been, but all frozen over with icicles the size of trees, far away and barely visible on the horizon.
Hax didn’t linger for very long. With nothing left to do, he’d picked a direction and walked.
“You made me like this.” Hax says, for the lack of anything better to say.
“You grew into it.” Nerdi replies, the glass rod returned to the metal marble tables. He presses a button on the inside of his coat, and on command two other people in too-clean lab coats come inside the room and into eyesight.
Hax waits until they pick up a scalpel before he speaks again.
“Are you still trying to amplify my powers?”
Nerdi hums. “Think of it like a progress check, after so many years. The rest comes after.”
Then to the others, handing over a clipboard of which he had been jotting a list: “Collect samples of everything on here and bring them to lab 2.4, I’ll be in the office if you need me.”
Hax barks a laugh in the absurdity of it all, barely containing another sharp flinch when they start to rub his arm with a swatch of sharply smelling disinfectant, evaporating away and bringing a light chill to his skin. “I’m going to fucking kill you.”
“I’ll think about it once you can summon a blizzard.”
Hax is about to retort something about summoning a lot more than just a blizzard when the first blade rips through his arm, so he spends the next moment biting down his tongue. By the next time he came to, Nerdi’s long out of sight, only the bare shuffle of dress shoes on the ground and a belated message of:
“Tranquilisor shots are also on the desk if he’s uncooperative,” He calls from the door, “He shouldn’t bite.”
When they try to collect a saliva sample, Hax makes sure to bite the guy’s finger off, the first digit of his index dragging copper scent through his mouth and up his nose. He spits it back out and laughs when the lab man screams and clutches his hand to his chest. Dumb fuck.
As he begins to rapidly lose consciousness at the tranquilisor, he thinks: good riddance.
.
On the walk back to his containment cell, after all the various initiation tests he assumes, he finally notices the corridor stretched past the glass, lined with more cells carved into the walls like open graves. Shadows moved in them, slight and hesitant, too small to be anything but animals, but their shape suggested otherwise.
Hax squinted, a heart dropping stone-cold and heavy into the cage of his ribs.
Children.
Wide eyes peered at him from the glass. Pale and cubby fingers smooshed against the glass, but unnaturally still, almost to that he thought they were statues until one shifted, and the faint clink of chains carried through the air.
His self-assured smile froze, and silently slinked away. “Well, shit.” He murmured.
A boy in the nearest cell- nine, maybe ten- flinched at the sound of his voice, then tilted his head, studying him with that hollow, soldier-drilled stillness. The kind of look you didn’t see in children unless someone had ripped the childhood clean out of them.
It wasn’t the lab he’d grown up in. The walls had been different, the people are different bar one, he was different. But still, there were enough similarities to leave him aching, deeper than just physically.
.
The world was a crimson blur. Hax hung upside down, strapped tight to a cold iron frame of a bed, blood dripping down his forehead and leaking languidly into his eyes. It stung viciously like sweat, but thicker, and stickier, and it leaked out the corner of his eyelids in a mockery of tears. He’s long run out of them.
The itching reminds him to close his eyes, but closing them means feeling tenfold the aching remains of his body.
Someone in a pale, too-clean lab coat pressed another needle into his arm like they were trying to season a roast. He clenched his teeth against the gag, tasting cloth, copper, and something acrid. No anesthetic- HBG’s generosity only stretched so far.
Hax almost laughed, except the needle hit muscle instead of vein this time and his throat went hoarse against the gag.
.
The worst days where the ones that were plain torture, designed to wear him down and keep him under. Hax had always been designed to be an unfeeling thing, but they needed everything else out of his being as well—that attitude, that autonomy—it’s harder to weaponise someone when that someone is the type to strongly disagree, laugh in your face and then kill you.
So, began training.
They drowned him. Held him under until his lungs shrieked. Dragged him back, slammed him against stone, demanded the same things over and over again.
“Who are you?”
Hax tasted blood between his teeth. “Frostbite, you bitch!”
His head is forced under again. Through the bubbling watch, barely audible through his thrashing in the ice water, the voice says:
“You are Crocus, you are a hero.”
His head is dragged back up. “What will you do?”
Hax struggled with his breath for a precious few moments, mentally preparing himself for the water again.
“Destroy this fucking place.”
He has barely enough time to try and hold some breath before he’s in water again.
“You will protect the weak. You will repent for your crimes.”
Eventually he croaked it, sputtering water, half choking on it- but he said it clear enough they thought he meant it.
They starved him. Left him chained until his shoulders screamed and his wrists blistered. He hummed tuneless songs under his breath, just loud enough to needle the silence. One of the guards cracked at the six hour mark, and punched him across the jaw.
They deprived him of sleep. Days in pitch dark, then dragged into searing lantern-light until his eyes burned. No food but a thick, sickly broth he could barely swallow with his split lip. They injected something into his veins- burning, twisting, making his muscles twitch out of sync.
Hax knew the ‘training’ was getting to him the moment he started seeing what could only be Infume in the corners of his eyes.
It’s not Infume. He’s just getting desperate.
.
They strapped him upright this time. Iron cuffs bit into his wrists, spreading his arms wide against the wall.
A voice he didn’t know began to chant the phrases. Monotone, endless. The words rolled over him in waves.
You are Crocus, you are a hero. You will protect the people, you will repent for your crimes.
Over and over, in different cadences, in different voices. Men. Women. Sometimes children. Sometimes, worse, the voice was his own, recorded, echoed back at him.
Even worse are the voices he recognises, because when Infume—in Incense’s voice—says it, despite knowing that Infume would never, ever believe or say such a thing, Hax is so much more inclined to listen.
.
With every day, week, month spent under the ground, another layer of his paper mache soul wrinkled at the edges, scratched loose, and tore away. The fun parts of violence, his penchant for banter, the little flutter in his step when he still found the strength in himself to walk.
He doesn’t remember the last step he took by himself, without the support of the clinic walls. It’s either that or the embrace of the tiled floors. The tile floors, right. Right, right. Square, cold things.
Hax has had a complicated relationship with the cold. The familiar, invisible friend that must have accompanied his years until this cell, an intimate and loathsome reintroduction, to here.
Hax discovers for the very first time how the cold of tiles against his face keeps him grounded. It’s an old friend. It’s fitting.
The people in white keep talking about resonance in the snippets of curt conversation he catches between the dream-like sanctity, when he’s pumped so full of drugs and pain there’s a certain reverie in not knowing. When he floats between the hollow cloud of semi-consciousness, and he feels untouchable despite his mortal body.
Resonance. He’s something to Ranked City. It had always protected him. Resonance with something or other. He hasn’t been able to catch much.
Resonance. The echo from one place is a scream in another. If Hax screamed from here, will Infume be able to hear?
Of course not. The shadow, monolith creature standing always in the edges of vision where his sight begins to darken is a solitary thing. Or else Infume would’ve already come ages ago.
.
.
.
Infume gets the notification at 6am on a Tuesday morning, nearly a year and counting since Frostbite was eliminated from the streets of Ranked City and Hax was taken into HBG against his countless wishes and anger:
Your application to meet Hax Noises is approved. The introductory appointment happens at 7am tomorrow.
Infume closes his device with shaking hands, worn after the long months of making calls, writing letters, calling upon contact after contact for even the slither of hope; and thinks: Finally. Finally.