He wondered, as he sat in the dark of the stuffy, windowless cell, where she was. If she thought of him. If she ever felt as alone as he did without her. If she went to the bottom of the ocean like she planned.
Trying to count days when there was no light was impossible. For all he knew he was there only hours and not days or weeks. The only track of time he had was between the blare of heavy metal music or bright lights or the heating lamps they used between beatings or the screaming yells that ricocheted over the walls around them. The walls he scratched at in the dark to carve the same phrase over and over again.
When the lights came on, and his eyes gained enough sight to make out his etchings, he focused his eyes there to escape from the questions, the beatings, and the torment. He evaluated his child's scrawl from the dark nothingness and wondered if his torturers could read it. If they would use the name he repeated between the Latin phrase against him.
He prayed to the God he all but forgot that she was safe. That she thought he was too. That she would never have to worry about him as he did her.
And yet he also prayed that she remembered him every day. When the lashes came down on his back he hoped she thought of their nights together. When they cuffed his ears or knocked his chair out from underneath him he hoped her smile for him on the beaches or walks would be as genuine when they saw one another again. When they sweated him to exhaustion before turning the coolers on to freeze him with deluges of cold water he focused on the blue of her eyes when she dug into the chocolate desserts he bought for her. And when they left him to the silence or the noise he remembered her perfect laugh and the lilt she always had to her voice when she said, "Mr. Bates."
He remembered it in the same vivid detail he remembered everything about her. It ran on repeat in his mind to distract him from where he sweated and froze and suffered in the dark. Between the images of her, the sounds she made, the smells she emitted, and the feel of her under his fingers he only remembered one other thing.
The same phrase a Queen of France took as her personal motto after the violent death of her husband. The phrase that reminded him, in the dark and emptiness before him, that the source of his joy could one day be the source of his pain if he allowed it to be. For, "from this comes my tears and my pain."
Something he would never allow was her suffering. As long as he lived, which seemed shorter with each passing eternity and moment in turn, he would never allow her hurt. Which was why she dived to the bottom of the ocean and he sat in the dark waiting for death to come to him.
