Chapter Eight:

I didn't hear him for hours. Maybe it was more than that…or maybe it was just a couple of minutes.

"Sarah?" His voice broke through silence. He didn't sound quite so fragile as before, but I knew better than to think that he was perfectly fine. The only way he could have been any worse would be if he had been killed.

"My name is Saoirse," I answered. I couldn't stand the thought of him calling me that name. Even if Audrey had made a significant argument that I hadn't changed at all, I didn't want to be Sarah.

Other than his voice, it was oddly silent. Normally there would be scuffling coming from his side as he moved about, but not anymore. "Why didn't you tell me?"

I scoffed. Were we really going to get into it? There were so many things that we needed to focus on. Important things. "Tell you what? My name is Saoirse and it's been Saoirse for almost a hundred years."

"Why did you want to change it?"

I wanted to snap, but doing so now, over something so comparably insignificant to what he had endured only hours or moments ago, felt impossibly cruel. "It represented things that I didn't agree with. I wanted something new… to feel like I was a new person, reborn with my transformation. I wanted Sarah to die in the 1600s, just like my gravestone says."

"Why did you change it to Saoirse?"

"I wanted to feel free. Didn't I tell you before that it meant freedom?" I could have sworn that I had. Strange. How this place tended to make memories feel false and time feel as though its standing still. An hour can pass within a second some of the time, and other times, it takes four days for three minutes to pass. I closed my eyes. I tried to picture something nice. Fields, flowers…the ocean, but I couldn't. I could hardly remember what waves felt like, or how the petals on a daisy smelled. I closed my eyes, and all I could see were the walls. "Are….h-how are you feeling?"

It was a stupid question, and vague as shit, but I needed to know.

"It's worse if I move. But, can we just not talk about it?" He finished in an almost pleading manner. "I just want to forget about it. Please."

"Of course," I answered, drawing my knees up to my chest. "Once we get out of here, I'll make sure everything is taken care of."

"Out of here? Saoirse, don't be stupid." He snorted, not quite snapping. I imagined that he was far too exhausted to truly snap. "We are going to die in here. I came to accept it a few days ago."

I shook my head. I wouldn't believe it. I would never fall to the Volturi, and if I could hold on, I was sure that he could, too. "We aren't going to die. I promised to show you Iceland, didn't I?"

"Promises are feeble things to make. They tend to be rather fragile."

"Not mine. Not this time." I said softly, my head bowed against the stone. I wanted to be there with him. I could take a thousand days in bitter agony if I knew that he would be safe. "I'm going to get us out of here."

"I really hope you don't change, Saoirse." He said after a couple of seconds. I frowned.

"I don'- "

"Stay hopeful," He finished. "Promise me?"

"I will. I promise. Just like I promise to get you out of here."

He snorted. "What do you think would happen, if we were to try and break out of here?"

I turned about, and looked around the cell. It wasn't as though it was equipped with state-of-the-art security systems or anything of the sort, but something gave me the sense that someone was watching us, constantly. "We'd probably be ambushed."

"At best," He responded. "We'll be dead before we reach the end of the hall."

We had no way to guarantee that. Then again, we had no way to prove that that wouldn't happen, just as he described it.

"I just want to get out of here,"

"You and me both. It's time we accept our fates." He said, tone dull. He wasn't happy, or sad, or…anything. I wondered if he felt anything at all.

I feared that, a lot. I didn't want to stop feeling. I wanted to feel alive, and if I was numb… I was pretty damn close to death. "Jane will come and help you before that happens,"

"That isn't going to happen. If Jane could do anything, she would have done it already." He breathed out. A strange rustling sound came from his side, and it was followed by a low grunt and the sound of stone smacking against stone "Shit…"

He had tried to move. That must have been it. "You need to rest. Maybe everything will start to heal if you just don't agitate any of your wounds."

"Kind of want to get my pants back on." He answered. "'Sides, I'm not just going to lie in the middle of my cell where they can come back and have their fun without any trouble at all."

I cringed. "I'm sorry, t-that…that they…"

"Don't. Don't apologize for something that you had no part in. It wasn't your fault, and I don't want to talk about it." He grunted again, but he it did not sound like he had collapsed this time. "I just want to forget."

"I understand," I replied, sinking down the wall. "Alec? What do you look like?"

It was stupid, I knew. But I wanted to be able to put a face with the name and voice.

"Like utter and complete shit."

I rolled my eyes. "That isn't exactly what I meant. I mean…. How old are you? What color is your hair? How tall are you? What color were your eyes before you changed?"

"Why?"

"I want to picture you, and know that I'm semi-correct in what I'm imagining."

He laughed, and this one didn't sound quite as false as the ones before now. "Do you want to know what I used to look like, or what I look like now?"

I thought for a moment. I had a small inkling of the injuries he had received. All I had to do was apply those to his original appearance and it would be close to how he looked now.

"Before," I said finally, "I want to be able to picture you when we talk. It makes things feel less… lonely."

"I have brown hair," He said finally. I shouldn't have expected him to be particularly descriptive, and right now, any detail I could get would be welcomed. "Dark, I guess. Not close to black but pretty dark."

I smiled to myself as the ghost that I imagined for so long finally took a shape, a face.

"What else?" I pressed, drawing my knees up.

"I… Uhhh… my eyes would be red, of course. I expect both of ours are pretty close to black by now."

"Pretty sure my entire eyeball is black." I snorted, rolling my eyes. We'd gone so long without blood that the ache had finally started to die down, as tough the burn had numbed all of the nerve-endings in our throats. "Are you tall?"

He snorted. "No. Not at all. You're probably taller than I am."

"I'm about four-foot-eleven." I answered, "You'd have to be a hobbit if you're shorter than I am."

"One inch. I have you beat by one fucking inch." He scoffed. "Unbelievable."

"I'm sorry for your suffering, Alec," I teased. So I had a brown-haired boy barely taller than myself just a couple of feet away from me. "Do you want to know anything about me?"

"If you want," He said. He sounded indifferent. Not in the way that he wholly didn't care, but in the way that made me sure he wouldn't press me to tell him anything that I didn't want to. "To be honest, I have wondered, a bit."

I took a lock of my hair and held it in front of my eyes, a few inches dangling over my fingers. "I have blonde hair. A dark blonde, but… blonde still. It's kind of wavy. Looks like shit now, of course."

"Another pretty blonde," He laughed shortly. "I should have expected you would be blonde."

"I wouldn't exactly add pretty to it, though." I probably looked like a half-dead skeleton monster what with the chunk missing from my nose. It could be worse, I figured. At least she had the decency to leave the majority of my face intact. "I… I'm kind of fat."

"Fat. Right."

"Well… I mean, not really. I guess I just have an ass, but if I go by the actual BMI weight to height chart shit, then it says I'm fat. Whatever, right?" Female beauty and weight and body standards be damned.

"I'm sure you look just fine." He sighed. "Don't tell me you actually concern yourself with the bullshit doctor's adhere to?"

"Not at all," I huffed, my lips pressed into a tight line. My own body was not my concern, but I doubted the malformations my injuries in here had caused my face to have would be well received by the public eye. A vampire was never much worried about the opinions of humans, but we did tend to have something of an ego. At least, I did. I wanted so bad to be thought of as pretty, even by those that I had made frequent meals of.

"You said she cut words into your forehead, before?" He asked. He sounded concerned, but it could have been nothing more than curiosity. "Did you ever figure out what they were?"

I lifted my hands up to my forehead, brow furrowed just slightly as I traced over letters.

"S… L…" I murmured as the letters became clear in my mind. "U…T. Slut. Classy."

He snorted. "She could have picked an accurate word, but I don't think there are any nasty enough that apply to you."

"I could have done without her carving anything into my skin." I snapped. My stomach sank almost instantly. "I'm sorry. I…"

"Saoirse, it's alright. Both of us are on edge now." He reassured me. I wanted to cry. I was whining and bitching only hours after he'd been gangraped, and he was the one comforting me. How in the hell was that fair?

Awkwardly, in a desperate attempt to change the subject back to something somewhat pleasant (or at least distracting), I said through a half-giggle. "You sound handsome."

He chuckled, "I'll take that as a compliment."

"You should. That's exactly what it was meant to be." I breathed out in relief. It was a miracle that I hadn't made a complete ass out of myself. I probably had more interaction with him in a few weeks than I'd had with another living being in over a hundred years.

"How long you think it'll be until someone comes back?" He asked. I felt a chill run down my spine, and turned towards the door.

"Isn't there that saying, "speak of the devil and he shall appear?"" I asked, "Maybe if we don't talk about them, they'll all stay away forever."

"I've started to miss Kiersten and Tamsin." He admitted. Half of me wondered if something had happened to them. Kiersten was a vindictive bitch and Tamsin was like a psychotic adult-child, but both of them were better than Audrey.

My eyes darted over to the door again. Each time I looked at it, I expected Audrey's face to be pressed into the bars at the miniscule window, just watching me.

I was terrified at the thought of her, but I would welcome her into my cell with kisses and open arms if it meant that she would leave him alone.

With his recent injuries, it would be weeks before he was so much as half-healed. If she tortured him again, so soon…

He could very well die. Vampires didn't die easily. Most of the time we had to be disassembled and burned to be killed, but if anyone had the ability to find another way to kill a vampire, it was Audrey and Aro.

"What do you think would happen if we tried break down the wall between us?" I asked, pressing my hand to a stone at eye-level.

"They'd get pissed off. We'd get dragged to opposite cells in the dungeon, and they'd beat us until our bones were exposed and the flesh was entirely ripped off our backs?"

I cringed. Did he always have to be so graphic when it came to his descriptions?

"So, we shouldn't do that. Got it." I sighed out, pushing my hair out of my eyes. I just wanted out of this place, and if I couldn't have that… "Sometimes it's like you're right here, with me." I admitted. "Then, at others, I wonder if you're just a figment of my imagination…a voice to keep me company."

"I'm no figment, Saoirse." He answered, "We're both real, and so is this Hell."

"I hoped that it wasn't, the first few days. I wished so badly that this was just a nightmare."

He said nothing for a bit, "At nightmare would be better than this. At least we would be able to wake up from it."

"Do you think they'll really keep us down here forever?" I asked. I longed for fresh air, to feel the sun against my skin, to hear birds, or bees, or even the chittering of chipmunks. Alec's voice was one of few noises I'd heard in weeks.

"They'll probably kill us eventually." He replied, "Aro isn't fond of prisoners. If I wasn't so useful to him, he would have had me executed the second he learned of my fails."

"What about me? They've kept me alive and I've worked against Aro since I was turned."

"He may want to try to get you to join," He said calmly, "If he knows anything about your powers, he'll want to utilize them."

I laughed, loudly. The idea that Aro could somehow get me to join the Volturi was by far the most ridiculous thing that I'd heard in the time I'd been down here.

"That isn't going to happen. I'll rip my own tongue out before I join."

"Well, you might want to start tugging, because I guarantee that the only other reason that Aro has kept you alive is to get information out of you."

"Audrey already tried that," I sighed, "I don't have anything to tell her, or Aro. He'll just be wasting his time."

"Then make stuff up," He hissed, "Tell her whatever she wants to hear, because the second you lose your value, you're going to be killed."

"Aro is going to know that I'm lying," I murmured, "He'll be furious that I lied and then he'll off me right then and there."

"Aro hasn't come down here at all. He isn't going to start coming now and it's not like he can tell you've lied through Audrey's own thoughts," He answered, "And you are not going to leave me alone in this damned place."