Victor Cowen leaned against his usual spot on the wall, eyes closed, reciting his numbers. He'd been awake fourteen hours, thirty-two minutes and seventeen seconds. Two hundred and forty-five days since he was taken. Thirty-eight days since Sellars and Brand never came back, and the Letters--Victor's name for the "doctors" in the lab--and the Blockheads--the guards--got squirrelly. Well, even more squirrelly before. Bunch of mad scientist evil bastards. Fifty days until his heat.

Fucking heats. Victor was grateful they only came once a year. Did the Letters know about heats? Had they figured it out yet? He would never tell them anything they wanted to know, but others weren't as strong as he was. When others had their heats, they'd said they were simply taken to the infirmary and stuck full of needles and covered with scanners of all kinds. Victor couldn't imagine going through a heat strapped down, unable to take care of himself. Not that he would want help from any of the Letters. And the only alpha he'd ever seen in this place was Bob, who hadn't been out of wolf form in the entire time Victor and known him, and yeah, that definitely wasn't happening. He was probably borrowing trouble for something still a ways in his future.

Victor tried to focus on the constant count in the back of his head instead of worrying about his upcoming heat. "The human calendar," Will called him. Victor counted the seconds and minutes while he was awake, a constant mutter in the back of his head, no matter what else he was thinking about or doing. The only time it stopped was when he was asleep, and he tried to time that. He stayed awake for sixteen hours, or as close to it as he could count, and then slept, hoping that would round out to about eight. Sometimes the Letters liked to wake him up in the middle of his "night" and that completely screwed him up.

Counting was what kept him sane, and he knew that his hourly and daily announcements helped some of the others keep their grip on reality too. Mad scientist evil bastards. It had probably been the Letters' idea to leave the lights on all the time and block any signs of what time of day it was. They served the same three meals every day, and never consistently. Sometimes they'd be four hours apart. Sometimes eight. Only once had they been as long as ten. If you were smart, and you didn't have shitty cell mates, you'd hold back part of your meal to snack on, just in case they made it one of the long breaks. 

Victor let Bob have all his meat. The fur boy needed it more than he did. And Victor had always preferred vegetables anyway, much to his family's dismay.

His heart leaked feelings, thinking about his family, which wasn't helpful. He wondered if his younger brother Mitch made the varsity football team this year. Did his parents thing of him? Did they worry? Did they think he'd left them on purpose?

Victor shuttered that line of thinking, and turned his mind to studying the few patterns he'd been able to track. Dr. J, who was the main Letter any of them saw, didn't always come in to the cell areas, but anyone in the block who saw Dr. J during the day reported it to Victor. He was pretty sure he figured out what days the Letter was in. Assuming five days in a row, with his off days being on weekends... Once Victor was able to confirm that pattern, he would be able to correct his daily estimates without having to wait for the next unfortunate soul to join them. It wouldn't help him very much on time of day, however. He'd once spent a grueling twelve hours under Dr. J's knife, with little to no anesthetic. The only thing that had kept him sane was counting.

Victor suppressed the urge to yawn. No, he had to stay awake for another hour and eighteen minutes. He stood and stretched, his muscles tight from sitting so long. 

Will peered down from his bunk. "Time check?"

"Eight forty-eight."

Will scratched at his lip lightly, one of his milder tics from a long habit of smoking. "You think they're dead?"

Victor knew he meant Sellars and Brand. Sellars had been locked up as long as Victor had, maybe a couple days more. He'd been the most determined to figure out exactly what the Letters were looking for. And then they took him out one day and he'd never come back. Maybe he'd been shipped to another facility. Maybe he'd died. There was no way to know, and Will knew that. Victor didn't bother answering his clearly rhetorical question.

Brand had been an oddity. He'd been the first pregnant male omega he'd seen locked up with the rest of them, and he'd been there for less than twenty-four hours. He'd asked a pile of questions, and it was just after he was taken that the Blockheads had all disappeared, and then everyone went squirrelly after that. Tense. More on edge. And more Blockheads than before. If anyone had escaped, or managed to cause some trouble, it must have been Brand, even as terribly pregnant as he'd been. But Victor doubted he'd gotten out. It was more likely the Letters messed him up and he and the baby were gone. Victor found it hard to even think the word "dead" in that case. But if his alpha had managed to track him down, he could have at least caused the Letters some trouble. Victor hoped that was what happened, even though the results were that their previous zero percent chance of escaping had dwindled to a negative chance. 

Once Victor stretched out the last kinks in his body, he dropped to the floor to do push ups. Before this life, he'd been a little pudgy. He'd worn it well, because he was tall, but the unappetizing prison food and lack of entertainment options had thinned him right up. Sure, he spent a lot of his time sitting, but that had grown boring after the first week. The only other thing to do was work out. One of his first cell mates had been a personal trainer, and he'd helped Victor focus, to get past the point where he couldn't even complete one push up in good form. Now, Victor generally pushed himself to muscle failure, counting well past one hundred pushups each day.

A whuff of warm air pushed against his head, and Victor turned to see Bob watching him, his constantly sad, yellow eyes hidden just under the shadow of the bed. Bob hadn't said a word, but he felt a sense of understanding with Bob in moments like these, as if the were sharing the loss of their lives before, sharing the loss of their freedom.

Victor focused on counting once again. He couldn't dwell on the sad things. He definitely couldn't dwell on the happy things. He had to count. Counting was safe.