I can't escape these godforsaken walls.
I remain here trapped. Alone and cold... so very, very cold..
Days and time have ceased having much meaning and I can feel my thoughts struggling to follow their own tracks for too long now.
There is a looming darkness inside of me that is threatening to take hold, panic and fear opening the door for despair to sink in. Yet, I can only hope this last, certain feeling doesn't leave me, it's the only measure of my humanity I still have a grasp on, the only thing I recognise for what it is - desperation. If my despair wasn't here I' m not sure if I would recognise any of the emotions it would leave me with.
I don't feel that same fight in me I did at first and I don't attempt to escape any more. My courage was so long abandoned now that I doubt I would recognise it if it did make itself known again.
At first I had felt everything...
Panic when he captured me that day, my limbs flailing and scratching at whatever I could reach as I tried again and again to claw my way out of his hold. Then came the pain, the blinding light as his curse ricocheted through my body taking every scream from my lungs, tearing me apart with a blinding hurt that both froze me into motionlessness and yet burned my body to the ground, scorching it with pain from the inside out. The torture must have lasted seconds but it had felt like days to me.
I had fallen hard to the ground, a shaking heap of exhaustion and fear.
The dread swept in then as he stood over me. A suffocating kind of dread that told me this would be the end, this would be how I go. My head screamed at me to fight, to run, to do something - anything.
But all my fight had been taken from me and as he gathered me back into his arms, my head resting securely in the crook of his elbow, frozen in place. I was immobilised.
He had always been planning to leave. I understood that then. What I didn't know was whether taking me with him had always been a part of his plan or if my being here, alone and injured tonight had simply been an opportunity he saw and took in the moment.
Whichever it was, I only blamed myself because like it or not the choices I had made up to this point were mine and mine alone. It had in part been my own fault for agreeing to do any of it in the first place.
As he carried me, another thought hazily occurred to me while I fought to regain control over my body.
He must have knew, or at least suspected what I was doing for a while. It seemed too much of a coincidence now, everything that had happened to me that day, I had been set on a path to wind up here, with him, alone and in the most vulnerable state I think I had ever found myself in.
If I followed that gut feeling, that he had known for some time now, I let myself hope that he hadn't allowed me to continue on, knowing what I knew, if he was only going to kill me anyway. He had had his opportunity before now to act, to silence me if that was his goal. But he hadn't, he had waited until now, when he knew it would do the most damage to us all.
When his eyes glanced down at me, low in his arms, I thought I had seen something in their expression. Sadness? Regret maybe?
His eyes looked lost and unsure as though the soul behind them was processing feelings it hadn't before had to feel.
Whatever the fleeting look was it was soon gone, replaced just as quickly as it came with the usual cold icy stare. I kept my eyes fixed on his as he opened the door of the cabinet and together we passed through the threshold. I watched with pain and betrayal as his face became lost, obscured and distorted by the shadows inside the doors until there was nothing but darkness left between the two of us.
A/N: Thanks again for reading. These smaller breaks between chapters will follow a different timeline to the main narrative, though both will eventually meet up at some point further down the road. They are so short because I soon realised when trying to write them that I'm incapable of not spoiling things and don't want to give too much away this early on.