AN: The second half of this fic is graphic, so stop at the "ooo" if you do not wish to read the more violent bits. This was based off the French horror film of 2008 called "Martyrs". It's very violent, horrific, disturbing, graphic and upsetting, but I find the bond between the two leads to be quite inspiring and bittersweet. It's love, drowning in a sea of death, destruction, despair, demons and desperation. I think it deserves a spot in this anthology, although it is a very dark tale. Once again, stop at the "ooo" if you don't want to see the darker bits.

"Isn't it beautiful?" Anna asked Lucie as the two of them lay on their backs and stared up at the warm summer sky.

"Sure is," Lucie replied, sounding relatively content for once. Anna smiled to herself. It was days like these that she loved the most, where it could just be her, Lucie, and the sunlight. No other adults were around to tell them what to do, they had no schedule to keep, and they were not forced to stay inside their dismal little orphanage. Instead, on days like this, they were free. Free to live and to dream, no longer confined or hidden away by anything or anyone. It was just the two of them and the sunlight that warmed their faces.

But in Anna's mind, the best part of all about days like this came from seeing Lucie's smile. The poor girl had suffered unspeakable terrors in the past and she was constantly haunted by fearsome hallucinations, monsters. She was stuck in the ghosts and shadows of her past, forever trapped in a dark underground, a torture chamber. Everything there had only ever been black and dark. No sound and no light. The darkness of that place had stained her soul and she was a very grim person even on the best of days. But on rare days like this, she almost became human again. She became bright and warm again. She became alive and real again. She became like the sun and she remembered how to laugh and smile and speak, and as she said, it was all thanks to the sunlight. It was the sunlight that brought her humanity back to her and woke up her sleeping spirit.

"They tortured me down there, kept me totally cut off from everything else," she muttered darkly, shadows flickering across her face as her mind returned to that very dark and lonely Hell. "It was just me and them and all the torture devices that stood between. And no one even knew I was down there, no one remembered me, nobody cared enough to. They couldn't see me, so they didn't care. I was stuck in perpetual night, never allowed to see the sunlight, to see even so much as an inkling of one blessed little ray. But oh, if I would have!" Lucie stared longingly up at the glowing golden orb in the sky. "If I had been able to see even one little ray of hope, maybe I would've come out of it better..." she looked so longing that Anna felt her heart break, but then Lucie's face, eyes, voice and heart all hardened once again.

"But the sunlight is not for people like you and me, for the forgotten ones…"

"Well it is today," Anna finally declared gently, rolling over on her side to caress Lucie's cheek. Lucie seemed surprised by the sudden touch, but because it was Anna, that touch was quick to soothe her. "Perhaps we usually are the forgotten ones, lost in shadow and darkness, but today, we will become each other's sunlight and in each other, we will find and be found!" this was a surprisingly mature, deep and moving thing for little Anna to say, but she was determined in her words. Maybe they usually were the ones who went unseen and unwanted by the rest of the world, kept in a metaphorical darkness just because they had nothing of value to offer society (they were two poor orphaned girls after all, not very useful in society's cruel mind), but today, in this time and place, they would become the queens. They would become the world. They would become each other's worlds. And in those worlds, there would be sunlight, bright, warm and endless. They would shine for and upon one another and be to each other everything that the world was not. Just for that moment, they would be each other's entire universes and the sunlight would finally shine down upon them too.

And as Anna finished speaking her piece, Lucie began to smile again.

"Ok, Anna," she agreed. "I will be your sunlight if you will be mine…" and as her smile grew even broader, Anna felt the sunlight start to shine even brighter.

ooo

Fast forward a decade or so later and both of their suns had set. Lucie was dead, finally having committed suicide because she found herself unable to cope with the trauma of her past. The night finally settled in over her burning spirit and this time, the darkness was everlasting. She even killed herself during the night, vision darkening until it matched the sky. There was no more sunlight for her.

Anna followed not long after, thrust into the very same nightmarish pit Lucie had been subject to 15 years ago as a child. Anna had not believed Lucie at first, thinking that the concept of an underground basement torture chamber in the middle of a normal suburban neighborhood was too impossible and extreme to be real, but only a day after Lucie's suicide, Anna finally got a taste of it herself. Like a burning, blinding ray from the sun, Anna got to witness, firsthand, everything that Lucie had endured 15 years prior. The darkness, the screaming and crying, the isolation, the physical and mental abuse, the beatings, the starvation, the torture, the sensory deprivation, the chains and cruel fists.

Everything Lucie had described, every torture method known to mankind, was utilized to its fullest upon Anna's body. Her body was broken, twisted, beaten, worn and torn. Skin began to rot while it was still on her body, mind and eyes became hazy and unfocused, blood perpetually spilled from wounds and cuts and bruises that lined her face. She was fatally thin, broken bones visible under a very thin and worn layer of skin. She had a permanent hunch now, because she had been kept strapped to a chair for the months and months that this torture lasted. The chains were forever imprinted on her bony, broken wrists.

She had been sitting alone now for three days consecutively, not that she was able to tell. Time did not exist in this hellish place. She was entirely alone, deprived of any and all human life outside of her own. It was one of the sharpest tortures of all, the endless isolation and darkness. Even the overhead light had been turned off. She sat, physically restrained to the point of paralysis, alone in the darkness. No light, no sound, no movement, total sensory deprivation. Even her body was going numb from all the abuse.

And yet, and yet, even in the long nights, endless shadows and darkest hours, Anna was never completely alone. Whether Lucie's spirit really had come back to comfort her and give her the one thing she, herself, had lacked when she used to be the one in Anna's position, or if it was all only a desperate fever dream concocted by Anna's literally and metaphorically broken mind, Anna did not know. All she knew was that even in her darkest, loneliest hours, Lucie was there.

"And will you stay here with me?"

"Of course. Forever,"

And just for a moment, even through the pitch blackness that surrounded her, Anna thought for sure that she saw a thin beam of sunlight spilling down in the distance. For that, she almost managed a smile. Even down here in a tomb of the forgotten, Lucie still managed to find her and come to visit. As a result, even down here, Anna managed to find some sunlight, HER sunlight, one blessed little ray, and with it, she became just a little more human again.

The distant sunlight warmed her skin and she felt Lucie's ghostly hand run down her back before she vanished again, but she would not be gone forever. She would make good on her vows to stay with Anna even until the very end and beyond into eternity. For that, even if the clouds passed by now, Anna knew she would see the sunlight again somehow, and then, she would truly be free.

"I will see you again, my Lucie. The night cannot last forever. The sunlight will return eventually…"

In the distance, the little beam of sunlight got brighter and brighter. It wasn't sunlight at all. It was one of Anna's tormentors opening the trap door above the end of the hallway that led to her torture chamber. They were finally coming back to her once again, ready to beat her bloody and unconscious once again. But Anna was too out of it to realize as such and she continued to stare at the rays of sunlight peeking down from above, somehow missing all the tormentors who were closing in on her, clad in black, carrying chains and clubs, wearing steel-toed boots, ready to go in for the attack.