A/N: Hmm... I guess you guys did enjoy these. I guess I'll start them up again.
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Anne awoke to intense pain. Her left leg throbbed in time with her pulse, each beat of her heart sending a fresh wave of agony through her flesh, piercing spears of raw pain shooting up her spine as she tried to move into a more comfortable position. Her breath hissed through her teeth as she tried to sit up. It took three tries before she could leverage her back above her waist, and even when she managed that feat, she couldn't sit up straight. Instead, she huddled as far forward as her other injuries would let her, her bruised back and sides keeping her at a forty-five degree angle.
Oh, how it hurt. She could barely keep a handle on the pain, barely hold it at a tolerable level, and she had a very high pain threshold. It felt like every square inch of flesh had been beaten at least once. Her ribs creaked as she swayed, and she girt her teeth as she felt bone grind. Her breathing was as shallow as she could make it, and still it hurt enough for her to want to cry.
She picked up one heavy arm and placed the hand on the wound on her leg as gently as she could, but still wincing as flesh met inflamed flesh. She picked at her jeans, pulling cloth out of the wound, grimacing at the sound of it as well as the complaints that raced across her nerves. It hurt, she wanted to say, but bit her tongue. Of course it hurt. It was meant to hurt. It wasn't supposed to feel nice; it was a beating.
As far as beatings go, it wasn't a particularly good one. Sure, it had caused a great deal of pain. But generally… in the position that she was in, they didn't want to beat you to death. And this one had come close. Very close; there had been swelling on her brain that took her almost too long to combat. But she had made it over that hurdle, just to have her leg impaled. It seemed hardly fair.
Healing took too much energy, and her body was not used to having to expend it anymore. After using all the available food energy, it didn't want to release any energy from stores. Now that she was burning fat again, she felt a little better, her head a little clearer, but she still found herself seriously wishing that she hadn't skipped breakfast that morning. Or that her captors would supply some food. She looked wistfully about the room for some slop or anything with a caloric value, and was not rewarded.
She sighed, and went back to regarding her leg. Yeah, that was some gratitude there. More like… wound transference. Not that she didn't probably deserve to feel what he had gone through, what he had been required to live with. It was fair, from a certain point of view. But, she had never beat up on him so badly. Of course she had lied to him for years, and a certain degree of frustration was inevitable.
She wondered if she would ever meet someone who didn't take their frustrations out in such a violent manner. It had amazed her when she learned that some people, that most people were never the recipients of violence, that people were capable of having a relationship that did not involve the random cuff or attack when anger became too much to bear. It astounded her that her type of relationship was considered unhealthy. It was an amazing concept for her, life without violence, love without pain.
Love was supposed to be pain, wasn't it? Bearing it silently was the mark of how much you wanted the other person, speaking up or hitting back demeaning your true feelings, right? She was as much the giver of pain as she was the recipient, and that was healthy, right?
She shook her head slightly as she worked on her leg. How amazing it had been to find out that she had been wrong. You didn't hit the ones you loved You could go your whole life never raising a hand to them in anger. Or annoyance. She winced a little as she remembered shooting Knives. In retrospect, that did seem a little extreme.
She sighed, giving up trying to heal her leg for the moment, her concentration shot to hell. She tore off another piece of her shirt and wrapped it around her leg, careful to keep the cloth from sliding in the open wound as she wrapped it around her leg. With great care, she crawled over to the ledge and up onto her bed, throwing her wounded appendage over the side. Her ankle hurt a bit as it supported the weight of her leg, but the lack of pressure on the muscles of her thigh was a great relief.
"Why is everybody always picking on me?" she whined, voice echoing a bit in the empty room. She nearly started sniffling, but got herself under control before a traitorous tear could fall. Instead, she sighed once more, breath catching as she exhaled.
The warped door caught her eye, a gleam of amusement entering her visage as she contemplated what they must have gone through to leverage it open. It did look rather stuck now, forced into the closed position, panels bent in with obvious mark of hammer blows. She had long ago determined how to fix the doors here from opening, figured out how to destroy both the power supply and hydraulics system. Those doors were very heavy to move without mechanical help, and she had figured the knowledge would come in handy some day. She just hadn't quite pictured this situation.
Then the door began to move, and she tensed up, wondering what was going to happen to her now, her heart hoping that it wouldn't involve more pain, and the sinking felling in her stomach expecting nothing less.