Sapphira gasped in pain as he shoved her head back against the foam and let it drop again. Her vision swam and she retched, choking at the nothingness in her stomach, and when she regained clarity the good Doctor was staring at her. An unfamiliar Feeling surfaced within her: she recognized it as humiliation.

“I don’t think you can comprehend the obstacles I pushed through, Miss Lindsey. I jumped through hoops to be here… well, metaphorically.” He lowered his hand and rubbed his thigh, wincing. “As you can see, I can hardly walk. But imagine living just a few years at a time, the doctors and the surgeons telling you there’s only a year left, a month, a week before you’re just a rotten corpse to shove into the incinerator. To become just a file in some imbecile’s cabinet!” He hobbled over to a surgical tray close by. By the pain in her skull Sapphira could not discern the instruments from one another though they glinted in the fluorescent light. “Every day in my newfound misery I played the lapdog so I could get the next shiny new augmentation. Half of my organs are clockwork, Miss Lindsey. Each new upgrade meant a few more years, another step until you would open your eyes again and I could stand there to be the first thing you’d see, like a stillborn shaking limp hands with death…” He plucked an object from the tray and examined it, then turned to her. “I want to see the helplessness in your eyes, for what you did to me. I want to taste the despair in your blood. I am the oldest living man on earth, and every day is a painful living nightmare.” He moved to her as he spoke. The object in his hand became clear: a hypodermic needle, full of something aqueous in color. He froze in front of her, the needle wavering in the air next to her eyes. “But all of this…” He grinned with those nightmarishly perfect teeth. “This is worth all the effort to see you on your deathbed.”

The needle pierced her neck, cold as ice. She wanted to gasp again but it was as though she were no longer in control. Almost instantaneously paralysis had seized her body, a pointless cautionary measure considering she could hardly have moved an inch otherwise.

And then she realized she couldn’t breathe.

Her diaphragm was still. The muscles she needed to pull in and push out the oxygen she needed to survive were unresponsive. She would have widened her eyes in shock if she were able, but as it was Sapphira could only experience this slow death. Her mouth hung slack and agape at the Doctor, whose malicious grin was drawn into a smirk as he watched her motionless misery. She had awoken craving death. And now as it approached it was the farthest thing from her desires.

“Goodbye, Miss Lindsey…” The Doctor hummed. “Goodbye, goodbye for now…”

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Continue Sapphira’s story in Part 2.