Hello Everyone,
I'm sorry that it's taken me so long to write and post this, I hope that it's worth the wait. I also just want to say another quick thank you to all of you for your comments, I can't reply to you all individually, but I really do appreciate it.
She was disorientated.
She wasn't a natural traveller, sure she had travelled with her grandfather a long time ago, but she still couldn't land on a planet without having some time to get her bearings, the way that he did.
She didn't know how she had come to find herself in what the guards and officials referred to as cells, all she knew was that as the clock hit 8am, she found herself in a white box room, with nothing but a bed, suspended from one of the walls.
It wasn't as dark and dismal as some of the other prison cells she had been to or found herself in, it was much lighter, owing to a glass wall that separated her from the outside world, a wall which, she concluded, must be activated by a person's fingerprint, owing to the finger marks around one particular section of the glass.
At that point a guard walked towards her, holding a plate of food.
"I don't know what you eat or if you're hungry" he told her "but I thought I'd offer" he seemed nice enough, but she knew that looks could be deceiving
" What planet am I on?!" she demanded
"You're on earth" he told her as she shrugged and leaned against one of the brick walls
"I'll eat most things then" she informed him as he slid the plate through the glass wall, which seemed to part, just enough to let the plate of food through her cell and then closed up, quickly behind itself.
It was a full English breakfast, a meal loaded with memories and sadness, her husband had made it for her, every morning, during her time on earth and the smell of it reminded her so perfectly of him. If only she might have died before seeing the day where the English breakfast wasn't sitting on her bedside table as she woke up.
"Thank you" she murmured, picking up the plate and holding back her tears as the guard turned sharply on his heel and left.
10 am
She could hear a woman's heels, clicking against the concrete steps as she traced familiar names over and over again into the floor.
You promised
she couldn't help but mutter to herself
You promised
"Hello" she stopped tracing the words into the cold floor below and looked up to see the guard who had served her breakfast, and a young woman, in black heels and trousers, a purple t shirt and a blue jacket. She had blonde hair and a calm, warm smile on her face. She bent down towards the woman in the cell, who kept her back firmly pressed against the wall.
On a strange planet, trust was not a luxury that she could afford.
"I'm Rose" the woman with the blue jacket told her as she waited expectantly for the girl in the cell to say her name
"You couldn't pronounce my name even if you wanted to" she told Rose, who was now kneeling to the same level as the woman in the cell, who was sitting, upright on the floor.
"Would you let me try?" Rose asked, as the woman turned her face from Rose to look at the bed to the side of her
"That's a nasty wound" Rose told her as the woman looked down at her ankle to see a scratch
"Do you want me to get someone to look at it for you?" Rose asked, but the woman shook her head
"I didn't even notice, must have gotten it from home"
"Home doesn't sound like the safest place?" Rose told her, seeing that the woman had now turned back to look at her and was starting to open up.
"Wars never are" the woman in the cell retaliated, covering her ankle with her red cloak.
"Is that why you came here, to escape the war?" the woman in the cell nodded as Rose got to her feet again.
"Why am I here?" the woman demanded, standing up and turning to face Rose
"We need to make sure that you are who you say you are, there are a lot of lives at stake if we get things like this wrong" the guard told her.
The woman in the cells smiled slightly "So you think I'm a threat?"
But Rose shook her head "Personally, no, but I have orders and rules to follow" the woman nodded as she paced towards the back of her cell
"It will go much quicker if you tell me your species" Rose told her, to which the woman in the cell sadly scoffed
"There are people who would kill me if they knew what species I was"
"I've got a feeling I'm not one of them" Rose told her
"What species?"
"Human" Rose replied.
A comfortable silence followed as the woman in the cell weighed up her options. She trusted Rose and the guard, they had said nothing to alarm or scare her and not asked too much of her, which she was grateful for, it was their superiors she was worried about, but what could she do about that? She needed to get out of here, being trapped in a cage, like an animal, wasn't a very good place for her to be.
"Do you have some paper?" she asked "and a pen?"
the guard stepped forward and slid a pen and a notepad of paper under the glass wall and the woman began writing, a series of strange lines and circles before she carefully put the piece of paper at the end of the wall, which Rose reached out to grab.
"That's my name" she told Rose "and if you can translate that then you know where I come from" Rose nodded
"Thank you"
4:10 pm
Rose sighed as another effort to translate the piece of paper, given to her by the woman in the cell, ended in failure. Clearly the woman knew what she was doing. Rose smiled as the clock hit quarter past and she began to pack away her things for the day.
There was one last thing that she could try.
Favourites, Follows and Reviews are welcome as always.
I would be interested to know who you think the woman in the cell might be.
