I'm not sure if I know where this is going yet,so comments are very much appreciated!
Kate feared a lot of things, but pain had never been one of them.
She thought this to herself just after they'd opened the cell door to take her to breakfast. It surprised her. To her, pain was your actions catching up with you, and Kate ran. She wasn't used to being caught.
The guard's grip tightened on her wrist as they approached the cafeteria for reasons she would never understand. She wasn't a high-profile prisoner. She hadn't raped anyone, massacred the family next door or blown up a department store. Kate wasn't the tall black girl who punched people in the stomach in her cell until they gave her what she wanted. She wasn't the skinny, mousy haired girl who had put a bomb in an office block to get revenge on an ex-lover. She wasn't dangerous. She was just Kate.
Accepting her tray of breakfast with a scowl, she found an empty table and sat down. Morning was her time for watching people. After breakfast, she'd help in the prison garden, then go back to her cell without lunch and shut the door, pretending she had to be in there while other women wandered around outside and protested when they had to be locked in for the night. Kate had spent a year in solitary confinement, and now she was used to being alone.
The sound of a key in a lock used to petrify her. It meant she would be shut in, trapped, with nothing but herself and her memories and regrets to live with. At first she thought she couldn't live at all. She'd sit on the hard bed under the barred window and stare at the salmon pink walls, hungrily imagining the release of death and how it would happen. Finally she'd be free.
One day a piece of paper was wordlessly pushed through the little flap in the door with her breakfast tray. She ignored the solid bread and the cold porridge and picked it up. It was a newspaper cutting. Obviously the prison had thought she deserved to know she was famous in the outside world. That there had been press vans outside the prison gates for the two months since she got here, waiting for news on Kate Austen, inmate #3507, night and day. There had also been people trying to see her.
Kate had counted to five and sat back down on the bed. She needed to change her plans. She could no longer be free, now that people cared about her.
Now she relished the click and turn of a key. She'd lie on her newer, slightly softer bed with the toy plane and wait for it every afternoon, even wondering sometimes if anyone would bother to lock her in for the night. She'd been good, silent, for a year to earn her place in C-wing and out of solitary confinement. Now she was allowed meals with the other women, a job in the garden, and access to the library. She was also granted a pass to the visitor's room – the one thing she supposed she had been sub-consciously working towards, but no one had been to see her. It was irony at its heart wrenching best, but Kate had no desire to appreciate it.
The taste of the prison's bitter coffee lingered in the back of her throat as she walked down to the garden that morning. 'Garden' would be an over statement. There was a table with a few pot plants, a patch of grass and a flowerbed where nothing grew. A potting shed stood uselessly at one side, and, of course, there was the obligatory wire fencing surrounding everything.
Half an hour had gone by. Kate had planted what was most likely a weed in the dark soil, and now she needed the watering can. She hovered for a moment. A crowd of women stood by the door to the shed, and suddenly Kate's feet found themselves unable to move. But their voices carried over the stiff mid-morning air. The biggest one said she was going to kill Maria.
"Hey." Kate was there in a flash, not even thinking. "Put her down." She gestured to the plump girl held up against the wood of the shed by a single fist. The other women squared up to her, forgetting Maria for a moment.
"You want to repeat that?" The nearest one asked, tilting her head and sticking out her jaw.
Kate remembered she could run. "Just do what I say."
The woman with only one eye stuck her hands on her hips. "Or what?"
Kate shifted the bag of ice on her face. Plastic scratched uncomfortably across the wound on her cheek and she heaved a dull sigh. She shouldn't have hit one of them. She should have remembered that she was small and they were big; that she was weak and they were strong.
They had come for her on the second day she'd been allowed inside C-wing. Kate had been taking a shower. She hated showers normally, and this one was particularly nasty. The pressure was awful, it kept going cold and it smelled like sulphur. It made her remember a time when she'd been happy.
She was hit in the face first, reeling backwards. Her head slammed against the wet tiles and suddenly she had water in her eyes from the tears and the shower and she couldn't see anything. A black foot collided with her stomach over and over, and she remembered the Jamaican woman the prison officer had remarked about the day before. The one who hit people until they gave her what she wanted.
Kate managed to survive with a bruised stomach and no shampoo. She managed to survive with the cat calling and shouts that herded her whenever she ventured outside her cell, too. It turned out that the other women hated her for being the one in all the newspapers, which Kate could never understand since she had never asked for any media attention; had never given her mug shot to the press and asked them to write features on her. She was just Kate.
The next time a group came at her with a knife they'd stolen from the kitchens, she was ready. She wasn't afraid of pain. She kicked and punched and scratched any body part she could get to until the prison guards wrenched the fight apart and Kate was locked back in her cell with two crushed ribs and a black eye. But no one came near her after that. She'd put one girl in the hospital block.
There was someone standing by Kate's table. She looked up suddenly, tensing the breath in her chest and almost knocking over the cup of luke-warm coffee on her tray.
"Can I sit here?"
Kate's eyebrows knotted together, and she looked at the chair the woman was pointing to. "If you want", she managed to say quietly, and watched as she sat down. It was the ginger girl, the one who had been pressed up against the shed.
"I just wanted to say thanks", she offered. "For yesterday."
Kate noted the uneaten breakfast on her tray and knew there was something else the woman called Maria wanted. She shrugged and felt a twinge of pain in her arm. But it was ok. "No problem."
Maria paused for a minute or two, mouth slightly open. She seemed to be looking Kate up and down where she sat, from the too long dark hair that fell all over her shoulders to the rip in her dirty white blouse. "They thought I keep giving them less to eat at mealtimes", she explained without explaining, and Kate nodded.
"Do you?"
A flicker of a smile passed across Maria's face, and for the first time, Kate recognised her as the overly cheerful woman behind the servery who gave her food each morning. "Do you work in the kitchens?", she asked curiously.
Maria nodded a yes, and the two lapsed into silence.
Kate picked up her plastic fork and then put it back down again. Suddenly she longed for the coolness of her cell. The buzz of conversation in the cafeteria was bothering her, since it didn't seem to extend to her table.
"Do you want something?"
Maria looked surprised at Kate's blunt comment for a split second and then she broke into a smile again. Smiling suited her, Kate thought.
"What would you say –", she began, leaning over the table and casting a glance behind her, "- if I told you I knew a way to get out of here?"