Warning: Claustrophobic Situation, Mentions of Death

His fingers scratched against the decaying wood of the hatch, split nails barely managing to graze the rotting splinters that circled his head. Thin streaks of moonlight wept through the iron bars that separated him from civilization, glimmering and sinking away into the murky abyss of nightfall like ink against silk.

His face gleamed with sweat as he pushed against the wall, arms screaming in pain as he struggled to bring them back to his sides. They were currently stretched far above his head, pressed hard against the stone walls of his prison. He had barely managed to pry them upwards in the first place; the cell was just large enough for him to squeeze inside, forget turning or sitting. It had taken an excruciating amount of time and pain to dig them out from their position at his waist. And now his arms were stuck, and probably would remain so until a guard came by.

Or until he died. Whichever came first.

His oubliette* was smaller than the others; or at least he thought so. He had never ventured far into the dungeons when he was younger, and the few times he had attempted such a feat he had been caught by some hapless servant- or worse- his parents. The servants simply chided him, saying that he'd be next in line for a cell if he continued his little escapades (and oh, how he hated the irony).

(He didn't like to remember the one time his father caught him.)

But judging from the schematics that he'd reviewed all those (weeks? months? years?) ago, when he was still considered royalty, this was at the very least an older cell. The newer ones were larger in width, but quite a bit taller, and the entire hatch was made of metal, not just the grill itself. If he had been able to grab a hold of one of the bars, maybe he could have pulled the entire trapdoor down- except it would have landed on his head and probably busted his skull open. Although, at this point in time, it probably wouldn't have been that much of a tragedy.

The light shifted through the bars, angling itself ever so slightly as the moon changed its position in the night sky. If he stood on the very edge of his tiptoes he could see the frame of the window that the stars peered through, pressed against the remnants of that gaudy wallpaper his mother had insisted on plastering in every room.

His mother.

Sometimes, just as he finally managed to fall asleep, he'd think he'd hear her voice. That eerie little whisper that clung in the air, swirling around in the dust above his tiny hole in the ground.

But that was quite impossible.

She was dead, after all.


He vaguely noticed that it was hot, dreadfully hot and humid, the air stale with gross rot and dust. His tongue was dry and his lips were parched and pale as he breathed in the putrid scent of blood. He shifted, his bare feet crunching against the bones of the cell's last occupant(s).

His loving family hadn't bothered to remove any corpses. According to the guards, his father thought he might appreciate the company; he was always kind like that.

He hated them at first; dead bodies, however old, are not something you want bare skin to be in contact with. And boy, did those sharp bits hurt.

But after settling in, and after slowly coming to the realization that he'd most likely never escape, he began to go through his own little stages of grief. Like avoidance.

And the skeletons were deemed an appropriate prop for his escapist fantasies.

In his lonely confinement wherein he was accompanied only by resentment, he would fill the silence in his mind with delusions of grandeur. In particular, he would pretend that the scattered bones were that of any one of his older brother's. He made sure to put pressure on what he thought could have been an arm or a leg. They'd broken his enough times, he figured, and he might as well return the favor, even if just in spirit.

Sometimes, he'd go as far as to think of them as the remains of Queen Elsa whom, in his far-fetched dreams, he'd assassinated before conquering her kingdom. But when he thought of that, his brain reminded him in agonizing detail that his entire predicament was based purely on his own miserable failure. And he didn't like to remember that.

So nowadays, well after the anger left and all that remained was mind-numbing boredom and misery, he considered them company. They weren't his sadistic brothers, nor a winter witch, nor the ghost of his mother; just rotting corpses, left for dead and forgotten in the silence just as he was.

And good company they were. They never argued, nor screamed when he stepped on them, nor called him rude names or beat him when they were upset. And the rats would rather gnaw on the measly, easy to tear bits of flesh that clung to the rotted cadavers than his raw, dehydrated skin.

Yes, the rats. He named them, actually.

The littlest one was called Anna. This one was his favorite, mostly because it was just an annoyance. It squeaked far too much and pooped everywhere, and occasionally nibbled on a toe or two but otherwise kept to itself.

Then there was Weaselton, the rat who enjoyed perching on the man's feet for the sole reason of crapping in his festering wounds. He often found himself praying that it would get a disease or something and just die already.

And finally there was Elsa, who was quite simply bipolar. Generally, the rat would sit in its little burrow where the stones didn't quite meet, doing absolutely nothing, until suddenly it would decide to attack him with claws and teeth galore. There was virtually no way for him to fight back, as it was already hard enough for him to move, much less stomp and kick. And when it had gotten its fair share of blood the rat would retreat back into its crevice and leave him be until the next assault.

Stupid rat.

Maybe it was just hungry (although maliciously so). He knew he was. The guards occasionally came by and dropped some food off- literally. Due to the fact he was trapped in a claustrophobe's worst nightmare, he had to catch whatever they threw down to eat in his mouth. If he missed, then the rats got his meal, as he most certainly could not bend down to retrieve it. He learned that lesson fairly quickly.

In terms of water the dungeon was always moist, so he usually just licked up the droplets that cascaded down the walls of his cell while simultaneously ignoring the squirming bugs that laid in the cracks. He wasn't sure why it was so wet, except that the royalty obviously didn't care to keep the dungeon in proper working condition. Not that they really needed to. It was filled with criminals that nobody cared about.

Like him.

Reflecting on it, he found his situation almost humorous. His family, as predicted, hadn't even bothered to make any sort of official announcement on his punishment; they simply swept him under the rug (quite literally), and kept him barely alive because. . . actually he didn't know why.

He'd never know why, because they never spoke to him, not even when he came back from his little trip to Arendelle. As soon as he had gotten off the boat he was escorted to a prison cell, which he had remained in for about a week while the royals discussed his sentence. There was no trial. Eventually the guards came and briefly relayed his "official" punishment before wrestling him into the oubliette, where he had been, for. . .

However long it had been.

It was both unsurprising and utterly shocking, like a monster in a child's closet; the child always knew, always insisted that their boogeyman was real, yet when it finally crawled out of the darkness, the realization that it truly existed was astonishing. He knew his family didn't care, didn't notice him; but to realize how much they really didn't care was a shock. It shouldn't have been, and yet for whatever reason he thought that maybe, somewhere deep inside they cared.

What a joke that was.

And now here he was, damned to an eternity of darkness and rats and skeletons, all because he tried to impress the family who, he now realized, probably still wouldn't have cared even if he had managed to conquer Arendelle.

Ah, irony.

He still hated it.

And as he gave into exhaustion with his arms still fixed over his head and the rats rustling in the bones beneath his feet, his last thought of the night echoed throughout his skull.

A hundred dead had spent their last night here.

He would be joining them soon.


A/N: *An "Oubliette" (literally "Forgotten Chamber") was a French invention dating back to the 14th century. They were prison cells that were usually used for people that the captor needed or wanted to be forgotten about. It was basically a tiny hole that just barely fit a person; most of the time the imprisoned couldn't move at all. The prisoner was dropped inside through a trapdoor in the ceiling and then, as suggested, essentially forgotten about. Sometimes they were kept alive if they were deemed important, (e.g, a political prisoner). Most of the time they were just left there and died of starvation or disease or whatever else. As I'm sure you can tell it doubled as a form of psychological torture; being left alone in a tiny chamber filled with rats and maggots and usually other bodies was not much fun.

Although there is some controversy as to whether they really existed intentionally. Some think it was more of an afterthought; as in, royals dropped people into ice storage units because they ran out of room in the dungeons. In this story we're pretending that the oubliette was intentional, because who knows.