A cry for help

She was falling. The clouds and endless blue sky sped her by. Or maybe she was flying. It was impossible to prove one over the other. It was really just a matter of perspective.

But regardless of whether she was actually flying forwards or falling down, it would always end the same way.

She would not find freedom or a pot of gold at the end of her journey. Instead, she would always open her eyes to meet the bars of her cage.

And her captors would be carrying her and her prison down a grey hallway. The hallway was always very long and she would never see her captors, only the trail of their bloodied footprints on the ceiling as they approached the ocean at the end of the hallway.

The footprints would always point in the opposite direction. Perhaps they had their feet sewn on backwards?

She did not know. She did not care. She would open her mouth to scream but no sound would come out.

On some nights, she would be gagged, on others her lips would be sewn roughly together.

They would eventually reach the ocean, they always did. And then they would toss her and her cage onto a rotting boat. It was full of holes but it never sunk. And no matter how much she wished otherwise, it would always bring her to the same place.

She would gnaw at the bars in desperation only to find that either she had shrunk or the cage had grown. No matter which it was, she would always find herself small enough to slip between the bars to feel the rough sand beneath her feet.

And when she turned back to look, there would be no cage, no boat, no ocean. Nothing would be there but a jungle before her.

And there would be nothing in the jungle even as everything was there. The flamingos would however, always be there for her.

She would gaze upon their garishly pink feathers and their thousand eyes – each red and demonic as they tore her limb from limb. And there would always be this little girl staring at her as she stared at the flamingoes. The little girl was pale, almost as pale as the moonlight, but her eyes were as red as blood.

"Free me," the other child would mouth.

And Integra could never answer, not before she opened her eyes to find herself back in her own bed, drenched in sweat.

The first few times, she had screamed. Her father and Walter would stay to comfort her until she fell asleep from the sheer exhaustion of trying to keep awake.

Nowadays, she mostly settled for swallowing her tears until fatigue took her back into more dreamless slumber.

But she would never forget the other girl's eyes.

Red was the color of blood.

Red was the color of danger.

And red would be the color of her shroud.