The camber was white, white and cold and pristine and sterile.

White like the clouds and the light of the sun in the summer.

White like everything he had ever imagined to be clean and pure.

White white white white…

How long had he been in the chamber already? Days? Weeks?

Years?

He wished he knew yet, he knew he couldn't.

The white swallowed everything.

It swallowed time and feeling and smell and sight.

Only white remained in its merciless deprivation.

He swallowed, wincing when his throat protested weakly. He had run himself hoarse with his screams and his cries – not for any real relief or hope of rescue, really, he just needed to hear something – and idly wondered what color his next goo of a meal was going to be. At least it was something other than white, and it had a taste, bland, something he wouldn't have eaten had he been back with his parents in the circus, but it was something.

He lived now for something other than the white.

He closed his eyes, feeling the dryness of his skin pull at his cheekbones and the cake-y texture of his eyelashes stick both upper and lower eyelids together – there would be no more tears to cry, apparently – as he let out a soft sigh of defeat.

"… he…hello?" a soft voice called, high, sweet, like the sun breaking out from between the clouds after a storm.

Dick's shoulders tensed, his hands instantly pushing his body forwards.

"W..who…"

"Please don't talk!" the voice whispered again, barely audible through the thick walls of his white universe. "There are cameras monitoring you! They'll know! Please just tap your fingers against the wall if you can hear me!"

There was urgency in that wonderful song, in that sweet ambrosia that seemed to fill his every being. How long had it been since he had heard another voice?

He slowly tapped his index finger against the wall, frowning when he managed a muted thud at best.

He let his body fall once more, ear surreptitiously pressed against the wall, his heart beating a staccato of anxiety inside his ribcage.

The voice came once more.

"Thank god," it said, relief evident if watery and weak. "Listen, they are trying to break you with this void, they want you compliant and obedient and I fear they will make it."

He knew it, he could have guessed it already if the expressionless, dead-eyed guards he had seen the day they had dragged him from his bed were any indication. Was he to become one of them?

A shudder ran through his spine.

No.

He couldn't let it happen!

"I… I don't know how yet," the voice whispered again, filling slowly with urgent conviction. "But I won't let the void take you. I'll protect you, Dick. I swear!"

A tear rolled down Dick's cheek, followed by another and finally a third, his limbs shuddering with an unknown sensation as he listened to the voice whisper his name. How long had it been since he had heard anyone call him Dick?

Had it been his mother, the last one?

And now this voice, this sweet balm in his broken psyche was calling him Dick once more, was promising protection and safety.

He felt something cold and hot and sweet and bitter curl inside his stomach, turn his insides in ways he had never felt before with something he could guess was hope.

And he clung to it.

He clung to it and the warm security it offered, he covered himself with it as if cloaked and turned from the white and its massive oppression.

He could do this.

The voice would protect him.