Challenges (A microfic collection)
Bad Decisions
by ♫Dex
Semptember 9th, 2019
Prompt: "Decisions"
Bad Decisions
The door opened. A nurse walked in my field of view.
"Hello, dear. Sounds like you've been taking some bad decisions, lately."
She raised a syringe, grabbed the IV line that was keeping me alive, and stabbed the needle right into its port.
"First, there's joining the resistance. It's not illegal, sure. It's still an unwise choice to pick the losing side."
"Then, you started abducting government officials to... "deprogram" them. You couldn't know that it didn't work. That what you did was torture. But you had to know how badly it could go."
"Anyways, there's a third bad decision."
She slowly pushed on the piston.
"Kidnapping my sister."
I trashed against the restraints holding me in bed, to no avail.
"Oh, don't struggle, dear. I won't kill you." She grinned. "I'm here to help."
My head was becoming fuzzy.
"You see, after this gets into your veins, you won't worry about bad decisions anymore. You'll just do whatever I want. And, once you come back here, to deliver all your dosed-up "rebel" friends to me. After you bring my sister back. Well... you'll see. There's plenty of ways we can use you."
Notes:
Although it ended up moving in a different direction, this was directly inspired by the events in Nevermind's Resistance, Broken, published literally a week before this prompt.
I always really liked the plot of "big evil brainwashing government" vs "resistance faction" when it ends up with one resistance member betraying their friends (and for that, I'll point you to a lot of stories by Trilby Else).
This was also the first short I wrote that I was knowingly disappointed in. I had to make major cuts to the events in order to make it fit into the 200 words limit, and ended up cutting in the wrong places too many times. I think this made the whole result very weak and event-heavy. The good news is that I learned a lot about what not to do, and I think I did better going forward !