Chapter Text
Jai West always felt something was wrong about that hallway.
He didn’t have his dad’s instinct for cosmic threats or his twin sister Irey’s sixth sense for emotional shifts—but he knew something waited behind the white door at the end of the east wing.
No plaque. No number. Just a small security keypad that blinked red whenever anyone got too close.
He’d asked about it during his first week interning at Keystone State Psychiatric Hospital. Dr. Faulkner, his supervisor, had waved it off.
“That’s the Closed Unit,” she said with clipped authority. “Only specialized staff have clearance. It’s been sealed since before your time, Mr. West. Focus on your patients.”
He did focus—on files, on rounds, on psych evals for his summer credit—but his mind always drifted back to the door.
Something called to him.
---
Two months in, Jai began eating lunch near the east wing, telling himself it was “quiet for reading.” The static buzz in his chest grew stronger each day, a barely noticeable hum like a heartbeat behind the walls.
Then one afternoon, as he unwrapped his sandwich, he heard it.
A whisper.
So faint he thought it was a trick of the AC.
“I’m not dead… help me…”
Jai froze. His sandwich fell to the floor.
He leaned closer to the door. “Hello?”
A moment of silence.
Then, again: “Please… I’m not dead… help me…”
His chest tightened. “Who are you?”
The voice cracked like dried leaves. “Lian.”
The name struck him like lightning.
Lian Harper.
She’d been his friend when he was six. Scrappy, wild, always a little dangerous and a lot braver than anyone else their age. She disappeared without a trace—died, they said. He remembered his parents being cagey. Uncle Roy falling apart. Heroes whispering like ghosts behind closed doors.
But she wasn’t dead.
“Lian, it’s Jai. Jai West. Do you remember me?”
Silence.
Then: “You’re real?”
His throat tightened. “I’m real. I promise. And I’m coming back tomorrow.”
---
That became their ritual. Every lunch break, he snuck down to the Closed Unit. He couldn’t open the door, but she could hear him through the vents. She was older now—sixteen, like him—but spoke like someone starved of voices. Time hadn’t been kind to her. The way she talked about Amanda Waller, about sedatives and “testing days,” made Jai’s blood boil.
“Why didn’t anyone come for you?” he asked one day.
“they were told I was dead,” Lian said. “And then waller put me here and locked the door.”
---
On the twelfth day, Jai brought her a new book to read through the vent. But as he started reading the first chapter aloud, alarms screamed down the hall.
Red lights strobed. Footsteps thundered.
He turned to run, but the security team was already on him.
“INTERN 493—UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS TO CLOSED UNIT. DETAIN AND REMOVE.”
“Wait!” he shouted. “There’s someone in there! A girl!”
But they didn’t listen.
---
They moved her that night.
Jai wasn’t supposed to be there when it happened—but he ran. Pushed speed through his veins, not full-on Speed Force, but enough. He made it to the loading dock in time to see a white van with no plates.
He ran to the back. A single slit of a window in the door.
And then he saw her.
Eyes wide. Lips parted.
Even after ten years, he knew that face.
Lian.
She stared at him, blinking as if seeing a ghost.
And then—her mouth formed his name.
“Jai?”
He stepped forward. “Lian—it’s really you.”
But the van pulled away, tires screeching on the pavement, swallowed by the night.
He stood there, fists clenched, heart pounding.
She was alive.
And they took her again.
---
To Be Continued…