Fun Fact!
I am actually a model and a photographer and I specialize in self-shot photography.
The vast majority of these photos actually exist and I am the subject of every single one of them. I either modeled the photos or took and modeled them myself.
I have changed a few of them slightly to better fit this story and my OC.
WARNINGS:
Descriptions of photos depicting or portraying abuse, domestic violence, ED, body image/weight issues, extreme weight loss, use of animal parts in photos, archaic and barbaric mental health treatments.
Chapter 27
Bucky had to get away from the photos on the wall. He left Sam standing there as he turned the corner, trying to get out of view of them.
He leaned his back up against the wall and rested his head back against it. Bucky was trying his hardest not to become physically sick. Fury like he had never known in his long life pulsated and radiated from his very core.
How could anyone do that to Ella? How could anyone do that to a child? How could Ella live through something like that?
The photos were burned into Bucky's head. He closed his eyes trying to ease the visions, but the images only grew stronger.
What the photos portrayed was one thing, how it was portrayed was completely and entirely separate. Everything about the photos led to the impression that Ella was playing a part from the past.
But the actions, reactions, emotions, expressions, everything else about them was too real. The tears she was crying were real. The screams that were soundless in still form were loud and clear in Bucky's head. The fear, plain in her eyes, was as if she were reliving everything again when those photos were shot.
Bucky slid down the wall unable to breathe. He wrapped his arms around his knees trying to hold himself together. All he wanted was to run to her and tell her everything was going to be ok. But it was too late. Everything had already happened and Ella was ok. She was ok now, at least.
Sam came around the corner and found Bucky sitting up against the wall breathing heavily. He looked pale and sweaty. If Sam didn't know any better, he would have thought that Bucky was about to pass out.
Sam crouched down next to him and put a hand on his shoulder.
"There's nothing you can do, Bucky. I know you want to do something. You probably want to kill someone. But the past is the past. And this is Ella's past. She was the one who decided to take those photos and she was the one who decided to hang them up on that wall. Can I go and grab you some water or something? Or do you just need a minute before you catch up with me?"
Bucky swallowed a few times before he could open his mouth.
"Just give me a minute, Sam. I'm in shock. I was not expecting that. I do want to kill someone, violently. But mostly I just want to run to her and make sure that she is ok. Which is a bit redundant now and would seem strange. I'll meet you at the next set in a minute."
Bucky stood back up and leaned against the wall again as Sam went down the hall to the only set of prints in this hallway. He was thankful that there were very few people around to witness what had just occurred.
He took some deep breathes, wiped his face on his sleeve, and went to meet Sam down the hall.
Sam was leaning against the opposite wall of the three photos that were hanging on the wall. They were by far the largest prints they had seen yet. Not including the canvases of warnings from the room before the gallery.
As Bucky walked up Sam looked at him. The expression on his face was unreadable. Bucky gulped in a large breath of air before he turned to look at the three prints. Afraid that he was about to see something similar to the last set of photos.
These were nowhere near similar. Bucky let out a sigh of relief. Sam kept looking at him, now in disbelief.
"Why didn't you tell me that Ella is a Green Beret?"
Bucky looked back at Sam, away from the larger-than-life photos.
"She's a what?"
"A Green Beret? Have you ever heard of a Navy SEAL?"
Bucky nodded.
"The Green Berets are the Army's version of the SEALs. They are the Army's Special Operations Force. And Ella is one of them. Look." Sam gestured to the prints.
The photo they were standing in front of was the second of the series of three. It was the largest of them by far. It showed Ella in full military uniform, decorations, ribbons, and all. It would have been any other usual military portrait, had it not been for the fact that she was completely topless.
Every patch, decoration, ribbon, and award was attached to her skin instead of the fabric that should have been there. The blood running down her chest in certain areas made it clear that they were pierced into her skin. And of those, there were many. She had a name tag that read 'E. Keehn' on the left side of her chest. Atop her head sat a beret. Which was rifle green in color.
It was true. Ella was a highly decorated Green Beret.
Bucky went over her decorations and ribbons, able to identify a few of them. Then he looked to the other two photos on either side of the main one.
To the left was Ella exactly the same as she was in the center portrait, only she had a piece of duct tape over her mouth. Bucky compared the two for a moment, and the duct tape was the only difference. Facial expression, posture, everything was identical.
To the left, again, was the exact same everything except Ella was about faced which showed her arms behind her back. She was gripping her arms by the elbows and her forearms were bound with a rope that matched the gold trim of her uniform.
Bucky and Sam were both speechless.
"I didn't know. Hell, I didn't even know what a Green Beret was until a few minutes ago. She told me that she was special ops, but she never mentioned this."
"A woman Green Beret, and a Captain at that? I'm surprised she's not yelling it from the rooftops. Did she say what she did after West Point?"
Bucky thought back.
"Fort Bragg, North Carolina. She was stationed there until her job here."
Sam chuckled.
"Yeah, you wouldn't have made that connection. Fort Bragg is the headquarters of the Green Berets."
Sam looked pensive and then he gave Bucky a strange look.
"Did she ever say when she was stationed there?"
Bucky was confused.
"Ella told me that she's 32, Blipped out, so add five years which would make her 37. She was 18 when she joined the Army and went to West Point. She graduated from West Point at 22. I'm not sure how long she's been at this job though. You do the math. Why?"
"Because women were not admitted to join combat roles, including Special Forces and Operations, until 2016. There was no way she could have been a Green Beret before then."
Bucky seemed more impressed than surprised. If anyone could get around that, Ella could. And it looked like she had.
"You're just going to have to ask her about that one yourself."
Bucky was still smirking at Sam when they rounded the corner of the other wide hallway for the last half of the show. Bucky was gearing himself up to see things that would get to him. In more ways than one. The next set of photos on the wall were another test.
This particular set of prints were all the same pose. There were six photos in all, making this the largest set of images of the show so far.
Each of the six photos showed Ella standing, facing the camera. What differed in each were the bruises and lacerations that riddled her body. In a few of the photos, Bucky could swear he could see what looked like bite marks.
She looked like she had gotten the shit beaten out of her. Though her face remained untouched and perfect in each of the frames.
The tears running down her cheeks as she stood there displaying her injuries pulled at Bucky's heartstrings. He didn't want to know what these photos meant. He didn't want to analyze these or look at them any longer. It hurt him to do so. He was so tired of seeing her hurt and hurting.
He quickly moved to the next set of photos before his eyes had a chance to catch up with his feelings and he started tearing up in the middle of the show. Sam was right behind him. Aware, but not about to say anything. He knew Bucky was going through the wringer tonight, and he was proud of him for doing so well.
Though he would never tell Bucky that.
Next was another single photo. It was of Ella smiling widely, eerily. While a spidery, shadowy form reached around from behind her, hooking its long, crooked fingers into her cheeks to make her do so.
"That's not creepy at all." Sam said as they moved on down the new side of the gallery.
The next part of the show was the part that Bucky had been fearing. The part where things got more explicit, more provocative, more disturbing, and more controversial.
A series of four photos were next up on the wall. Ella wrapped tightly in plastic wrap. Particularly around the waist. In two of the photos, the plastic wrap was also wound around her thighs and arms, contracting them tightly.
The plastic wrap around her waist acted like a makeshift corset. Cinching her waist to an impossibly small size. One that did not fit her rather curvy measurements.
The other two photos had Ella wrapped tightly in the plastic wrap in the center of the image. Each end of the plastic disappeared off camera. She looked like she was in the middle of a tug-of-war and the plastic was the rope. Each pose was highly editorial, yet off balance due to the pulling on either side. Almost as if she were artistically falling in both shots.
"Beauty standards are fucked. People perpetuate an impossible beauty standard and expect the average woman to live up to it. That hasn't changed much since my time. That's what I think this means." Bucky spat.
The next set of photos were disgusting and disturbing. And Bucky could not figure out which came first or what exactly earned those descriptors the best.
Four frames hung next to the plastic wrap portraits. Each one had a model posing in high fashion poses you'd see inside any major fashion magazine. Wearing nothing but a pair of sky-high strappy heels. With just a couple of exceptions.
The first being that the model was almost emaciated. She was so skinny that every bone on her torso was poking out. Her ribs were visible, her collar bones were extreme, and her hip bones could cut you just by looking at them.
Bucky wasn't even sure whether or not this was Ella or not. Due to the second exception.
The model had a severed pig's head over her own.
"What the actual fuck." Sam mumbled as they both got a closer look.
Bucky realized that there was blood leaking from the pig's head and trailing down her body. In each of the four photos, there was more and more blood. Making its way further and further down the model's body. It did not look fake.
Neither did the head itself. As they got closer, they saw that the eyeballs were foggy and filmed over as was normal in the decomposition process. Bucky thought to himself the same thing Sam had just said.
Sam and Bucky looked at each other, didn't say a word, and moved along.
This series of photos was another large one. This one contained six photographs. All set in what was unmistakably an abandoned mental hospital.
In these photos, Ella was posing in various places in the hospital. It was also then that Bucky realized that the emaciated model with the pig's head was indeed Ella. Because in these photos she was just as skinny as she was in the previous set.
Ella's face looked gaunt and hollow. Her eyes were sunken and dull. She sat splayed in an old wheelchair in a hallway whose walls were peeling with old paint. Then there was a black and white tiled room with a bathtub built into the middle of the floor. She was lying on the floor, half in, half out of it. Almost as if she were crawling out of it. Hair covering her face.
A photo of her facing away from the camera, looking out of a large window just off-center of the frame. In what had been an old tuberculosis ward or a recreational room. Then Ella laying on a metal operating table under a light that had probably not been on in 50 years.
Another photo showed her in a padded room that was just as filthy and degraded as the one Bucky and Sam had seen not 48 hours before. She was wearing a straightjacket that was tightly laced, sitting in the corner of the room gazing into the camera with her hollow, dead stare. Her hair was a tangled mess, her face stained and dirty.
The last photo of this series was not what Bucky had been expecting. It showed Ella running and jumping through the overgrown garden of the hospital. Hair blowing out behind her as she bounded through the shot. Captured in mid-leap. The main building of the hospital was in perfect view in the background. Flowers were blooming all around in a rainbow of colors. She looked happy.
By this point, both Bucky and Sam had given up on analyzing every photo. They each had their thoughts, feelings, and opinions. But neither felt comfortable enough to share them. They were each just experiencing everything at this point. Taking it all in and processing. That and there was no telling what would be next.
Following the abandoned mental hospital series came another that could have bled right into the previous. Only these were of the actual treatments rather than the hospital itself.
In this series, there were four photos.
The first showed Ella, still extremely skinny, strapped to a metal table with leather restraints. She was obviously in severe distress and was tugging at her restraints so hard it appeared that she was drawing blood.
Next was another room. It was completely black except for a single point of light shining straight down onto her. From what Bucky could tell, Ella was back in a straightjacket, in a padded room. Only this time she was in the middle of the room, hunched over on her knees, looking down at the ground. Her hair falling all around her face. This was the darkest photo he had seen yet. It was so hard to make out any details.
Then came a photo of a tub full of ice water. The shot was taken from above the white tub. Ella was in the middle of the floating ice cubes, floating on her back. Her complexion was extremely pale and her lips had a blue tinge to them. This photo was more of a portrait than the last two had been.
Bucky was not expecting the next photo and moved on as soon as he saw it. He had already had one brush with this in the last few days, he didn't need to be subjected to seeing Ella be part of his nightmare too.
It was a photo, a portrait, of Ella with a rubber guard in her mouth, electrodes on either side of her head at her temples. Electricity coursing through the electrodes through her head causing seizures. She was biting down hard on the rubber guard as if she were screaming. Her eyes were rolling into the back of her head. The tendons in her neck were taught with the tension.
Compared to the previous photo, the next one was not as horrific to Bucky. Although, he thought it should have been. This one was an extreme close-up shot of part of Ella's face. Her eye. While an icepick hovered just above it, about to be driven into the socket. A lobotomy.
Bucky wanted to forget the electroshock photo so he stared at this one while Sam caught up to him. She had such beautiful eyes. Even in a photo that was staged, the terror in her eye looked more than real.
Bucky could even make out the reflection of the icepick in the bright green of her irises.
The monster in his head wanted to come out. To protect her. From all of the things that she had been depicting and portraying. Bucky was feeling worn out just from viewing all of it. He could only imagine what it must have been like for Ella to create, curate, and display all of this.
When Sam finally caught up to him, they exchanged looks. Bucky could tell that Sam had not been expecting any of this either. And it was bothering him, too. It was a lot to take in. Even for Bucky. Especially for Bucky.
They moved along to a photo that seemed completely out of place in the series of photos they had just seen.
It was a highly contrasted, full-color portrait of Ella dolled up to the nines. Nails and hair done perfectly. She looked like a pin-up model from the 50s. She was smiling a suggestive smile to the camera while playfully covering herself, cementing the pin-up status of the photo.
What set this image apart, and linked it to the previous ones, was the background. She was laying on a pile of prescription bottles. This beauty was laying in and among about 200 prescription medication bottles, by Bucky's estimation.
Bucky stood there looking at every detail of this particular photo long enough for Sam to come back and fetch him out of his reverie. One detail he had noticed was that every single bottle had the name and address blocked out.
Another single photo followed the pill bottle one. It was a digitally enhanced photo, but it struck Bucky hard.
Ella was on the floor. She was facing away from the camera, in profile. She had her hands over her ears and she appeared to be screaming at the top of her lungs.
What struck Bucky was the mouth with jagged teeth that were coming out of the back of her head. It was more of a muzzle than a mouth. It was extremely animalistic.
Bucky could only think of the voice in the back of his head. How it felt exactly like this picture looked. How he thought of it and himself as the White Wolf.
And here was a portrait of Ella screaming with what looked like a giant mutated wolf's muzzle snarling out the back of her head. Was fate screaming at him or trying to tell him something? Because this shit was not funny.
"That voice in the back of your head is not very nice sometimes." He told Sam.
They moved onto the next series of frames. This one had four photos in it and it was set in the middle of Times Square. Though Bucky could not believe this was a real on-location shoot. Mostly due to the fact the Ella was completely nude with figures of people blurred around her.
In progression it showed her opening a hole in her chest, reaching into it, and pulling out a heart. Then she looked as if she was handing it to the camera.
This set must have been computer enhanced. Firstly, there was no way she had taken these in the middle of Times Square. Secondly, it looked like there was a slit opening in her chest. Her hand disappeared into the hyper-realistic hole. And she pulled out what looked like a real, and bleeding heart.
After the pig-headed photos, Bucky wasn't sure if it was real or not. Referring to the heart. A pig's heart looked almost identical to a human heart. He looked closer and after a minute of looking at it and the blood dripping down her arm in the last photo, he would bet money it was real.
"Thing's just get curiouser and curiouser, Alice." Sam said under his breath.
"Funny thing is that this doesn't exactly feel like Wonderland." Bucky responded.