Noah Bennet stared through the security glass at the man balled up on the slab beyond. Ever since the lights had turned on the subject had kept his eyes carefully tucked behind his arms, as though the sudden brightness was painful. Noah supposed it was; the side-effects of the drugs the man was on were, he had been told, far from pleasant. Periodically the man's muscles would seize in brutal shivers, and he would press himself down into the cold, bare concrete beneath his body as though searching for any shred of the comfort so absent from his cell.

His misery was palpable, along with his rage and pain, but in the time that Noah stood there, watching Gabriel Gray as he trembled tearingly through his drug-filled torments, the man hadn't made a single sound. Noah refused to admit that impressed him.

"Have we gotten anything from him, yet?" he asked the scientist beside him, dressed in a pristine lab coat.

"You mean aside from some pretty damn creative insults and more assaults on our personnel than I care to consider?" The stocky redhead shrugged his shoulders. "Not much."

Noah didn't appreciate the editorialization. "The glycimerine hasn't had any effect?"

"No, his system burns through it as fast as we can pump it in. We've given him enough to kill a whale." He shook his head disbelievingly. "A whole herd of whales, but nothing seems to really get through."

Noah frowned as Gabriel Gray shifted, raising his arm slightly and showing his red-rimmed, bloodshot eyes. He glared weakly at his two visitors, as though he had heard them talking and wanted to make something of it, but then his arm dropped back, and his body sagged once again into the slab beneath him. His attitude screamed of exhaustion and exhausted pain. "A pod," Noah said softly. The shunt in Gabriel's head glared whitely against the dark thatch of his close-cropped hair.

The scientist looked at Noah sideways. "Pardon?" he asked, nonplussed.

"Whales move in pods," Noah elaborated. "Not herds."

"Right," the scientist said, regarding Noah carefully. "Well, anyway. Even with the Haitian suppressing his healing he builds tolerance faster than than it takes the glycimerine to bond." He shrugged helplessly. "There are other drugs, but they're experimental."

"Will they get the job done?" Noah asked bluntly. He had an agenda for this particular special, and there were secrets in his DNA that Noah was determined to figure out. No matter what it took to find them.

The scientist sputtered in surprise. "I--but they're..." He paused, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Maybe. They haven't been approved for human use, though, and we don't know how they'll react with everything else we've been giving him."

"Put him on them," Noah ordered. "If they don't work, put him on a curare drip and carry on."

The scientist gaped at him, aghast. "B-but... you can't mix curare and cimerines! They're chemically incompatible, they're like ammonia and bleach! It would kill him!"

Noah gave him his best blank stare.

Sighing deeply, the scientist turned to stare helplessly at the man huddled in the cell before him. "Yes, sir," was all he said. "I'll start him on a double dose of thanatiprin, then." He turned away to leave.

Noah didn't watch him leave.

***

Claire paced in her cell restlessly. It took exactly ten steps to go from the back wall to the forward wall, and precisely eight to go from either side, unless she lengthened her stride--but then she had to take that little half-step to compensate for the remainder. It never changed, it never varied unless she made it, and it was driving her mad.

The walls were the same, blank gray as when she had woken up in this cell she didn't-know-how-long-ago. They were just as solid and just as impenetrable, no matter how many times she had run her hands over them, looking for an escape. The seals between the sink and toilet and the wall maintained their ruthless integrity no matter how many nails she tore away picking at them. All she had left was pacing and counting.

It was exactly as she had feared--after that first conversation with her captor, the man with the horn-rimmed glasses, she had seen no other person aside from the one who brought her meals. Sometimes it was the man in horn-rimmed glasses himself, sometimes it was the woman who threw electricity, sometimes it was a tall, black man she had never seen before. Usually, though, it was some faceless, homogenous stooge. It didn't matter; regardless of the face on the other side of the glass, she would press up against the window, trying to get close.

She was lonely. She craved human contact. A conversation, anything to relieve the pressing solitude she found herself confronted with. Occasionally she was drugged, she supposed by something in her meals, and when she woke she would be clean, and her bedding and uniform would be changed. The violation, cruel at first, had settled to a dull ache; it was just one more way they isolated her. She no longer knew what day it was; she had no concept of what time of day it was. Her life ran on the rhythms that her captors set her. Periodically the lights would turn off and she would fight to stay awake; every so often they would turn on and she would attempt to remain asleep.

The monotony was mind-numbing. When she wasn't pacing and chasing her mind in circles she was sleeping more and more, though it was none of it restful. She supposed it was a way to keep the boredom and solitude at bay; if she was unconscious, she wasn't reminded of her predicament. But even sleep no longer held the peace she sought.

The last time she had slept she had been in her mother's kitchen, sitting at the table and peeling, coring and chopping apples while her mother tended the pot of apple butter bubbling over the fire, adding spice and more apples, and stirring constantly so it didn't burn. It had been vivid--she could smell the heady aroma of the apples, and the sharper scents cinnamon and allspice as they coiled through the moist heat of the kitchen, made all the hotter by the baking, early September sun outside the open window, to tweak her nose. She could see with stunning clarity the embroidery that tripped along the ties of Mama's apron, and felt the steady weight of the knife in her hand. Her skin twitched as a bead of sweat trickled down between her shoulder blades, under her stays, and out of reach. If not for the fact that her best friend from her Chicago years, Charlotte, who had died in the Fire, had been next to her instead of her sisters, Claire might not have known she had been dreaming at all. She had woken with her eyes burning, and her pillow soaked with tears.

She didn't know how much longer she would be able to keep her mind together.