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Taylor would claim it was necessary. Lisa would say it was an effective blow to morale. Brian would insist it was a risk.
The truth was Alec just couldn’t help himself.
Leviathan had come and gone and left the city a ruin. The heroes were broken, the villains were roaming free and Aegis had been bloody chunks pasted across the pavement. When they'd found him, his adaptive biology was barely holding him together.
As far as anyone was concerned, he was dead. The armbands had claimed as much.
That’s why it was such a brutal tactic to show up to confrontations stringing the Wards’ supposedly deceased captain along with them.
“Carlos no!” They would scream, tears forming in their eyes as the Brute would beat them down.
It was only a little funny. But anyone could see there was humor in it. Or maybe irony.
He was more of a weapon than a person in combat. A cruise missile Alec could use to break through walls or take out problems with.
But there was, as there always were, problems with containing parahumans for later use.
The others weren’t particularly satisfied with his insistence that Aegis was brain dead, Leviathan having delivered just enough of a hit to turn the boy off but keep his body going.
There was barely any resistance when Alec filled in the blanks.
But nooo, they had to put him in a big steel box when Alec wasn’t using him. The walls were thicker than he was tall, soundproof and completely airtight.
Simple right?
You’d assume so. But about a week in, Aegis’ nerves had stopped responding. He was in there, definitely. Alec could still feel him, he just hadn’t had an excuse to bring out the Ward.
So Aegis was in there, stationary, for days. Distantly, Alec hoped he’d just starve.
But Aegis survived. His nerves pulsed with life and writhed under his skin.
Trapped in the cage unmoving.
Alec sometimes felt an uncharacteristic dread that would run down his spine as he walked by the room. He never really cared before, yet he found himself taking a step away from the door.
No sound ever came from within. No movement indicated reaction.
One night, Alec found himself awoken by a bang from down the hallway. A thud of something slamming into metal. He could almost tell himself he'd imagined, it if not for the reverberations still bouncing across his lair.
He waited a moment, his mind's eye confirming that Carlos hadn’t moved.
A second moment passed and he shrugged, returning to the warm comforts of his bed.
Twice more he woke to ground shaking thuds. The vibrations ringing in the walls ensured that he couldn’t simply chalk it up to imagination.
On the fourth waking, he dragged himself out of bed, fed up with his rest being disturbed. He took a baseball bat with him and delivered 8 hits to the metal,taunting the brain-dead boy within.
He slung insults and threats, drawing on Lisa’s persona as much as he could. The Master claimed that his friends had forgotten him, that they were far happier without him. He told him that he was going to be trapped in the cage forever, and that when Leviathan decided to come back, he would finally be put down.
The thuds stopped after that, and Alec was rewarded with an entire month’s worth of uninterrupted sleep.
That was, of course, until instincts ingrained in the boy from a young age suddenly jolted him awake. He had developed the skill to wake up immediately if someone had been observing him for more than half an hour. He hadn’t had much use for it in years, and yet it was as potent and vital than ever.
His eyes snapped open and took in the world. His gaze settled on a figure cloaked in darkness. It wore no features on its face, only a vague shadow where the eyes and nose were supposed to be.
Its chest crumpled inwards like a crushed plastic bottle, and then expanded outwards to its original position in a steady rhythm, a rasping hiss accompanying every compression.
The figure’s torso had no arms, and didn't break into legs at the hips. It was a single, continuous form of a human body.
Alec then became horribly aware that he couldn't move. His limbs didn’t respond to him, he couldn't command his head to turn or his fingers to flex.
The figure said nothing and against his will, Alex’s eyes fluttered closed.
He snapped out of his bed in the morning, a compulsion bringing him to the door of Aegis’ room.
Still sealed.
The nerves inside remained stationary. No sign of motion in the past month.
Unwilling to leave it unattended, he sat in front of the door, keeping watch on the motion of the nerves inside.
No motion.
The first day passed, and no movement was observed. The night approached and Alec kept still.
Still.
Keep still.
Unmoving.
The night was gone before he could blink, and the second day was coming to an end. A state of complete immobility.
His thoughts became sluggish as the lack of sleep crept up on him, but he kept awake. He had to stay awake.
When Aegis’s nerves started to move away from the tight humanoid form they were held in, he wasn’t sure if he was dreaming it.
His eyes were wide awake, and yet white-hot stands in his mind's eye began to line the walls in a way that was impossible.
They stretched out and extended under a break in the airtight seal.
Alec was held in place. His muscles failed to react or respond.
From under the door slithered out a tendril. Skin moving outwards inch by inch. Agonisingly slow.
He couldn’t move, he couldn’t think.
He waited for the skin to approach him as the hours ticked by, held in the moment of horror as the second day came to a close.
The night was spent waiting for more and more of the flesh to reveal itself, squeezing through the tiny crack and bunching together at his feet.
The dread built and mounted. The lack of control over himself was all too familiar, all too comfortable to him. He had been here before, and yet couldn’t run. He didn’t scream, didn’t make a fuss. All he showed was a quiet, calm obedience.
The skin swelled and grew as muscles filled it.
Only a fragment of what hid inside.
Alec then found himself forced upwards, movement finally being gifted to him in spite of his mind breaking exhaustion.
Slender fingers reached up and stabbed into the figure's eye sockets, and from the cavity came a gaze.
Eyes held within.
The gaze tightened on his face.
Alec raised his hand to the door and turned the lock, Aegis guiding his hand to open the door.
A puppeteer with strings of his own.
It swung inwards, pulled by a force several times his own and he glimpsed writhing skin and flesh, exposed nerves and eyes forcefully crammed together in imitation of insectoid compounds. The mass was red and raw as fingers pushed against the walls and ground like a centipede. The skin unfurled and slipped through the crack with a hiss of restructured lungs.
It inched closer and found purchase on his bare feet, dragging itself along towards him. Fingers gripped him and pulled the skin up his legs, up his thighs, up his waist, up his chest, up his neck.
Around his head.
Down his throat.
Filling his skull.