She awoke what felt like a long time later, handcuffed to her chair, a gag in her mouth. The room was well lit, nicely decorated. And in it, besides her and Moran, was a single person. A woman, leaning against the wall, arms crossed over a business-casual outfit.

Moran woke up a few minutes later, head throbbing, mouth dry, from alcohol or drugs he couldn't tell. He looked over to see Lorna tied to a chair as well, looking disgruntled but alert, and relaxed slightly, before turning his attention to the other occupant in the room and raising an eyebrow.

"Sebastian Moran. Weird, finally meeting you. I've known about you practically my whole life, you know. And I would have been content to have stayed away, but..." the woman sighed, blue eyes drifting around the room before landing back on Sebastian. "Now you're in my way. But I guess it's only polite to introduce myself, right? I'm Sara Moran. Technically, Dad never married my mother, but it'll be easier for me to get elected if I have his last name."

He stiffened slightly, taking in the woman with new eyes. It was hard to deny the information now that he had it. They shared the same clear blue eyes and blond hair, and he could see his father in her, mixed with something he didn't recognize. She was younger than him by a few years, but not many, few enough that it might have been a trick of her makeup.

"Polite, maybe. Stupid, definitely. Why the fanfare, if I'm in your way? Why not just kill me?" He didn't need to ask why he was in her way. That was obvious.

Sara sighed, hands falling to her sides. "I'm not a murderer, you know. Not yet, at least. I don't have plans to become one, but that's always subject to change." She paused, looking neutrally at her older brother. "I just need to put you away somewhere no one can find you. I just thought I owed you a small explanation, first."

"You're going into politics but you have a semblance of a conscience. Should be interesting. You do realize what organization you're messing with by doing this, correct?" he asked with a raised eyebrow.

"Yes, I know. Dad told me. He's... got a little bit of a bone to pick with your lady friend." She looked at Lorna for the first time, almost curiously, but there was a sharpness there that was familiar to her. Sebastian possessed it too. Then the blonde looked back at her brother. "It doesn't matter. No one knows where you are."

"He deserved what he got. No reason for you to get mixed up in it," he said calmly. "As for no one knowing where we are, that's very confident of you."

Sara shrugged again, unconcerned. "I don't need to convince you. Time will do that for me. Goodbye, Sebastian. I hope you find peace." She pushed off the wall and turned for the door, slipping out without another word. A few minutes later, and five men entered, three going to Moran, two to Lorna. She barely had time to register the fact that the man nearest to her had pulled out a syringe before the needle entered her arm and she drifted into unconsciousness.

His elbow ached.

That was his current point of focus. His sanity. He wasn't sure how long he'd been in the blackness, the nothingness, but it had been far, far too long. He couldn't stand up or lay out completely, and his muscles were cramped and angry. At this point he was almost positive he would give a finger to be able to stretch out completely for five fucking minutes.

When he had first woken up here, his exploration had taken very little time. The bedrock floor and slanted steel door led him to the conclusion that he was in some sort of root cellar. A hole in the corner became his toilet, and a leaky hose in the corner provided water if he lay under it and let it drip in his mouth long enough. Food rolled down from a small hole in the ceiling at unpredictable intervals. That had all taken an hour to figure out, and then it had turned into loneliness, isolation, hell.

Now, his elbow ached. That was the only thing he had to focus on. He had slammed it into a wall to keep himself sane. The pain was good. The pain was different.

How many different sensations can I cause down here? What new kinds of feelings? Of pain?

He didn't bother to stop the train of thought for a while, before he pulled up short as he realized he'd been contemplating methods of self-amputation.

Think of something else...

An old Irish song he'd learned as a child popped into his head, and he curled up in the corner like he had so many times as a boy.

Bhí fear de ghníomhas dúbailte

Cé a líonadh a gairdín iomlán de síolta. Nuair a thosaigh an síol ag fás

T'was cosúil le gairdín iomlán de sneachta.

Nuair a thosaigh an sneachta ag titim Cosúil éin a bhí sé ar a bhalla...

Wrath, Lorna soon learned, ran in Moran's family. Sara had had no use for her - there was a campaign to run, after all - and so she'd been given to Riordan Moran. The man who she'd left broken and beaten in his home more than a year ago.

Riordan was not the creative genius that his son was, and for that she was eternally grateful. She had a lot of time to think about it, locked in a pitch black basement that she could only really describe as a dungeon. There was a light on the ceiling, but the switch was operated from outside the room. It was just as well. After a while, she was glad that she couldn't see the stains. Her life was a nightmare enough without the visual stimulus.

She'd known from listening to Sebastian that his father was a cruel, uncaring man, but it was one thing to know it, and another to live it. And live it she did.

He cycled tortures like a jukebox set on a permanent loop. She almost wished he would think of something new. Knowing what was coming tomorrow was a torture in-and-of-itself. Maybe he planned it that way. After a while, it simply ceased to matter. It wasn't long after that that the nightmares stopped. Perhaps her brain had finally come to peace with the fact that no amount of rehearsing would make the situation change; but whatever the reason, real, good dreams returned. Most of them starred Sebastian, in some form or another, and when they didn't, they starred his father - specifically, his father dying in violent, slow ways.

Cosúil éin a bhí sé ar a bhalla.

Nuair a thosaigh na héin a eitilt

T'was cosúil le longbhriseadh sa spéir Nuair a thosaigh an spéir a crack,

T'was cosúil le fuip ar mo chúl...

He carved it out in the walls with the tip of the hose, traced it until his fingers bled, wrote it on his arms with nails and teeth. It kept his heart beating.

A/N

The poem/song Sebastian recites is

There was a man, a man indeed
Who sowed a garden full of seed
And when the seed began to grow
Twas like a garden full of snow
And when the snow began to fall
Like birds, it was, upon a wall
And when the birds began to fly
Twas like a castle in the sky
And when the sky began to crack
Twas like a whip upon my back
And when my back began to smart
Twas like a penknife in my heart
And when my heart began to bleed
Then I was dead, and dead indeed.