I jolt awake, not with the abscence of oxygen but with the sudden finding of it. All I can remember last was the hand over my mouth and the weak attempts I made of ripping it off.

My perpetrator chuckles at my desperate, relieved breath.

“Don’t get too excited,” he sings. “No one can hear you down hear.”

I don’t doubt him. Where I have woken in seems to be a laboratory of average appearance, only with shelves hiding threatening industrial walls. The white lights arrogantly illuminate the space, its color reminiscent of an asylum. Similarly so, I sit up right, bolted into a metal chair than no one with any kind of magical strength could break. It only makes me want to leave more.

My gaze shifts towards the man who brought me here. His eyes are cold and, strangely, silver, like the binds of my wrists. He sneers with evil delight, and my heart beats faster.

“What the hell do you want?” I spit. No matter how angry I try to sound, I am afraid. Terribly so. And he knows it. He eats off of it.

“You, of course,” he says simply. “Why else would I have brought you here?”

I open my mouth to speak, but he continues, pacing around the room while doing so.

“I get that you have healing powers, correct?” He looks at me, then laughs. “Rhetorical question. We both know you do. They’re quite impressive aren’t they? You can heal just about anyone.”

“I will not be healing you of anything any time soon,” I add before he can suggest anything.

“Oh, its not me who wants the fruits of your abilities. No, I have certain…targets, perhaps. And perhaps it will be better to explain why I’ve brought you here exactly.”

He stops his pace, right in front of a metalic stool. He uses a single slim finger to drag it right across from me, sits down, and stares at me like a psychiatrist. He even rests like one, intertwining his fingers and resting his elbows on his knees. His expression looks even empathetic. I don’t think he is.

“Have you noticed a pattern within your, shall I say, patients?”

My eyebrows knit, and he seems to be amused by this.

“Well, I’ve been paying attention. I always do, to everyone. A bit too much, I’m afraid. It’s a bad habit of mine. But anyway, I’ve kept track of some of your patients from four, five years ago that you treated, and…Do you happen to remember a certain Calypso Florentine?”

I keep my jaw, eyes unreadable. I’m afraid that any information I give him will reveal something I don’t want to.

“So you do,” he notes. “You just don’t want to tell me. Well, its alright. It won’t change what happened.”

He sits up a bit straighter and looks down at the floor, pretending to be sad. I wait for a response.

“Calypso died.”

“…And?”

“She was 31. Heart attack. How rare is that? Then I dug a little deeper. Raine Stevens, death by heart attack. Evelaine Taft, death by heart attack. It seems to me that in just the span of a few years, your patients hearts begin to fail. Did you know this?” He rises, peers down at me, and smiles. “Of course you didn’t. What I found out was that many of your patients feel amazingly splendid after you heal them. More than they did before their ailment. But its too much for their hearts, the euphoria. Its like being high all the time. And we all know you always fall after a high…”

The temperature, albeit freezing, is not what makes my blood run cold. It’s being under an allusion my whole life.

“You…You don’t have anything to back this up…Do you?”

My eyes plead to his back, which is now over by a table in the room.

“I did my own studies. ‘Indie’, if you will.” He prances over with a stack of papers, flipping through to find a certain page, and then lies it on my lap.

When I take a look, I am mortified to see that it is exactly right. The citations are from sources that I know never lie. It is well done beyond my levels of comprehension. All I can do is sputter, heart breaking for all the ‘healing’ I was doing.

“How does it feel?” he asks again, sitting back down on the stool. “To be lied to? How does it feel to know you’ve never done anything good? Nothing of use?”

“I…I don’t know what to say.”

Never in a million years will I trust this man, whose name I’ve yet to know but fear to do so. But he is reading me all too well. He is playing with my emotions yet not doing it at all.

“Would you want to help?” he pleads sincerely. He sounds a bit innocent, I confess. “Understand this power and use it for good?”

“How could this possibly be good?” I counter, suddenly ticked off. “All these people who are dying are people who I love and know are good at heart. These are people who I have never wanted to hurt. It is my duty to not let that happen to anyone else again.”

“Not even a criminal?” He suggests softly. “Not even someone who deserved it?”

He steps closer to my chair, his knee hitting the armrest. The sound of it rings around the room, echoing in my head.

The first tear runs down my face. “I don’t know.”

“Well, then,” he says, squatting down like how a teacher would to a kindergartener. “Let us find a way to get rid of this power, then. Cure you of it. No experiments, I promise.”

I look down at him. I bet he’s smirking, excited to see me patheticaly turn towards him, maybe showing off his more evil side. BUt with my eyes full of tears, his seem to twinkle. A warm hand touches my trapped one and I feel comforted. Maybe it won’t be that bad. And, if it is, it’ll be what I deserve. I nod.

“Alright. Let us begin.”

[wrote this really late. hope it makes sense. PLEASE GIVE ADVICE]