Okay, here's part one of Temari's ending. I've had this done for a few days but I wanted to get a bit more up so that I'm not just leaving you hanging.
Oh, and if you are a sensitive and imaginative soul, beware. Some of the torture and surgical elements may offend you.
Temari knew better than to wake up, she really did. With sleep the only solace she could have she should have fought to stay, fought tooth and nail to remain wrapped up in dreams of the warmth that she had left behind. Dreams of laughter and smiles, of a place where the crooked fingers of the darkness could never reach. And yet she always went so easily.
The pain was what she felt first, what she always felt when the dreams began to inevitably fade and reality began to coldly set in. There was something clouding her senses, making everything feel momentarily and blessedly dull, but even that faded to force her to feel the full brutal extent of the pain, like jagged nails being hammered into each of her nerve endings. She supposed that after all the years she had spent in a constant state of pain she should have been immune to it by now. But she wasn't.
Oh God, she wasn't.
She tested her surroundings first, pressing her finger tips against the frigid metal beneath her, flexing her wrists and ankles to test the restraints, breathing in the flat taste of the filtered air they fed her, feeling the press of the mask against the sensitive skin of her face. The air was cold, making goosebumps rise on her naked skin and forcing her toes to curl as if even that slight defense would help.
She could hear the beeping of machines -God, how she dreaded hearing those sounds- and the sound of metal clicking coldly against metal.
"Doctor," A deceivingly gentle voiced nurse said, "It seems that she's coming out of the anesthesia."
"Hn." He grunted, "Its fine. We have a bit more time before she regains full consciousness and even after it'll take a few minutes for her to regain any of her faculties. It'll be interesting to see how her body reacts as she becomes more and more lucid."
"Yes, of course Doctor." Came the dutiful reply.
Temari knew better than to open her eyes. She knew better than to release those last few ties to that blessed other world, and yet she still found her heavy lids slowly lifting to allow the blinding white light in. God, how she hated when the white overtook the black, when they forced the shadows she wrapped around herself for comfort away so that they could abuse her body like the animal they had forced her to become.
Slowly it all became sharper, everything more defined as her blurry eyes focused past the harsh light that hung above her. She flicked her eyes to the presences standing over her and saw the "Doctor" dressed in an operating smock, hair hidden beneath cloth and a mask over his mouth. One of his ever dutiful and heartless nurses stood at his side, handing him the instruments as he asked for them, their coldly calculating eyes focused intently on her torso.
Temari knew better than to look, to put the effort into raising her head and gazing into what the heartless devils had done to her. She knew that they were doing something sick and twisted to her body -weren't they always?- but she didn't know what. And for some reason she felt the need to look, felt the need to know even though she knew that it would likely destroy her.
And, oh God, it nearly did.
Her entire stomach was split open, her skin pulled back so that they could reach in with their dirty and depraved hands and destroy her from the inside out. She could see everything: twitching muscles, pumping organs, tissue and blood. So much blood. Her breath hitched and the nurse looked towards her, eyes widening in alarm as she finally noticed that their test subject had awakened.
"Doctor!" She cried, reaching down to grab hold of the woman on the table. At the cold and unfeeling touch of the surgical gloves meeting her skin Temari was roughly jerked from the frozen state she had been forced into by the sight of her body being dissected like it was.
And she screamed.
And she fought.
"Hold her down! Keep her still! Guards!" Temari thrashed against her restraints -both human and metal- pitting all of her pathetic strength against them, twisting as she tried to get away, trying to unsee all that she had seen, trying to unfeel all that she had felt. Trying so desperately to go back to the darkness that hid her and her body away from these vile monsters.
Hands pinned her down, trying to push another needle through her skin, trying to push more of that burning poison into her that allowed them to do as they wished to her body. In one last desperate attempt to seek freedom she twisted and the operating doctor cursed as she felt something inside of her tear.
"Sedate her. Now!" He screamed, one of the few times the inhumanly cold man had ever lost his cool. The needle slid through the fragile barrier of her skin, the heavy veil of darkness falling on her quickly as she heard the machines around her begin to scream indignantly, rapidly beeping and screeching at the people who stood in the room.
Temari knew better than to go back into the darkness. There was no pain there, no fear and no demons who looked upon her with eyes that looked amazingly like those of human's. The darkness was so peaceful. So calm. And that made everything so terrifyingly worse when she was forced back into consciousness. Yet she always went, always fell into that void and hoped that she could hide from them there, even knowing that they actually owned the darkness. Owned her.
And just before it swallowed her whole she called out, crying out with all of her pain and desperation as if someone could hear her.
As if she had hope.
Shikamaru jerked up in bed, panting hard as his body shook from the shock of the dream. Sweat had soaked his entire body, his hair sticking together in strands against his face and neck, heavy with it. He clenched the sheets in his hands as he tried to calm his rapidly beating heart, the sound of his ragged breathing filling the room. With a rough growl he rolled out of bed, stumbling into the bathroom to brace his hands on the sink as he looked into his refection in the mirror.
The small light that he had flipped on at his entrance into the tiled room illuminated the features of his face that had been drawn harsh because of the dream. And God, what a dream it had been.
It had begun how all of his dearest and most loathed dreams began: with Temari. It had been an odd dream, not like the others he had always had of her. His dreams of his wife had always been of the happy days they had had together, the memories he had of her.
Temari laying with the kids as she read them a bedtime story, her low voice shifting along with the characters as she made funny faces, trying to get the kids to laugh instead of sleep. Temari trying to cook breakfast for him that first time she had spent the night at his apartment all those years ago, cutting her hands miserably and burning herself all just to make him an omelet. The first time they had grudgingly told each other "I love you".
But this had been different. This had been strange.
This dream had been of him in a room that had been pure white, the glaring light that hung in the middle of the room sucking the color and soul out of everything it could touch. There had been nothing in the room but that light and a single metal chair that sat empty in the middle of the room, directly below the light.
And then Temari had been there.
He hadn't been able to reach out to her, invisible chains holding him in place as he silently called out to her, begging for her to come back. But she couldn't seem to hear or see him as she just continued to sit in the chair, surrounded by a world of overwhelming white. She slowly, ever so slowly, turned her head to him, the wide green eyes he had missed so desperately staring into him as they pierced his heart with sorrow.
Blood began to bloom at her stomach, staining the white dress she wore as it bloomed across the cloth like a flower. It began to fall from the corner of her eyes like tears, red trails angrily marring her skin. He had reached out for her, wanting to touch her, to soothe her, to promise her that he'd always be there for her, but she had just continued to stare at him.
Just then a scream had torn through the air, shredding the world around them apart as the bloody tears had continued to quickly fall down her face.
And he had woken up, that chilling scream still echoing in his ears.
He shook his head against the images that filled his mind, all of them supplied by that nightmare, and viciously turned the cold tap on the sink on, bending down and splashing his face to try and wake up and leave all of those images behind.
He leaned back over the sink, icy water dripping down from his face as he reminded himself again and again that it had all been a dream. That none of it was true. That it hadn't meant anything and he shouldn't read anything in it. That everything would be alright.
Because it had all been a dream.
Temari floated in and out of consciousness for two days, curled up on the cold stone floor of her cell as she fought between lucidity and the darkness. She didn't know which to stay with and which to fight against but she knew that either way all that was left for her was more pain.
At the end of the second day Temari found herself awake as she stared into the depthless blackness that surrounded her, the pain from her wounds sending agonizing electric signals through her body. She whimpered as she forced herself not to move, the stitches pulling at her skin as she twisted and sending heated and screaming signals to her brain that warned her to stop immediately.
"You back Girly?" Temari blinked at the familiar voice, the high pitch soothing her nerves and easing the fear that always made her so weak when she worried about being alone in the hell she was in.
"Yeah Screech." She managed to choke out, "I'm back."
"They do a real number on you this time, huh? I can hear it in your voice."
Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes and Temari let them fall, the small drops slipping down and into her ears, such a slight discomfort easy to ignore. Lifting one sluggish hand she lightly brushed the tip of a finger against the coarse stitching on her abdomen, her breath catching as she traced it all the way across, from hip to hip.
"Yeah. It was a bad one." What had they taken? Had they put anything in her?
"Will you be all right?" The high pitched voice asked and Temari cleared her throat, fisting her hands to her side. No. No. No.
"Yeah, I'll be fine. Scratches, that's all."
God, oh God, it hurts.
Please. Please. Save me. Hear me. Find me.
"That's good." Came the obviously false tone, but they both knew to ignore it. If you ignored it, there was a chance it would heal and if not it would kill you, and the two prisoners truthfully couldn't tell which was the better of the two options.
"Yeah."
Someone, please.
Asuma, Kyoko, Shikamaru,
The tears continued to pour down her face and into her ears, her broken nails digging at the stones beneath her, fingertips beginning to bleed as she tore her skin against the floor. Her breath catching, she tried to think past the pain and panic that would have blinded her had she had something to see.
Please.
I'm almost gone.
The fifth Mizukage of the hidden village of the mist smiled kindly at the group of ninjas in front of her as her assistant handed them their mission scroll. "I hope you all understand the severity of this mission. Numerous children have been thought to have been taken by this organization to be tested on from all of the countries, and so far no one has been able to successfully infiltrate one of the facilities without the information leaking and them moving before we can get there. And so to stop that from happening I have kept this mission strictly between everyone in this room. Not even the council will know until you are half way there. And because of this, if the information gets leaked I will be able to find out who did it," She said, continuing to smile at them, "And kill them."
The entire group was silent as they swallowed past the lumps in their throats, staring at the terrifyingly sweet smile of their leader with more than a little bit of fear.
"You will leave immediately and will contact no one." She said, nodding for them to leave after she had felt they had been sufficiently warned. The group hurried out, leaping over the roofs of the buildings to quickly get to the gates and leave the city to do as their Mizukage bid.
Kento was a simple man.
He had no wife or family, and no need of such foolish things, far more happy to give a few dollars for pleasure instead of the rest of his happiness for a "home". He went a bit too heavy with the sake when the bottle was at hand and ate a bit more than his doctor preferred. He liked the simple pleasures in life, and he especially liked them when they were given to him freely.
Kento was a simple man, which was why his job worked out for him so well.
He watched over the security for a "rehabilitation center", or at least that's what they called it when the whores asked them questions on the nights they traveled into town. And though he was simple, he wasn't stupid. Of course he saw the things they did, the people –or what used to be people- they kept in the high security areas. He knew the place wasn't legit.
But the money was.
The place also gave him benefits: they supplied him with food and booze after his shift every day, they sent a good and trained "helper" his way when they felt he might be getting a little stressed during work and they looked over the mistakes he made the few times he made them on the job. It was good work and good work was hard to find, so it was almost absurd how easy it was to look the other way when they wheeled those people out after doing God knows what to them, to close his ears against the screams that echoed through the halls every night.
His job was also absurdly easy. All he had to do was sit in a little room with monitors that kept track of every inch of the security system that surrounded the place and read a skin magazine or two, sipping at his coffee that his wished held a nip of alcohol in it. He had never had problems before and the monitors had always remained silent. Always but for the one day he made a mistake.
He had slipped into a nap –something he actually rarely did during work- and he awoke slowly, a strange beeping causing him to stir. It wasn't the blaring of his clock alarm so he didn't bother waking quickly, but it was an incessant sound that annoyed him to no end. He sat up, rubbing his face roughly as he looked around trying to find the source and saw that one of the screens was glowing a bright and bloody red, the beeping of the security alarm having woken him.
It should have been louder, it really should have, but his heavy jacket had been tossed carelessly atop the speaker, muffling the sound that had been going for god knows how long. Kento jumped from his seat, hurrying over to the phone and picking it up, desperate to do anything to salvage his job.
"Doctor! Doctor! Intru-" But all that answered him was the dull monotone drone that told him no one would pick up because the line had been cut. With a shaky hand Kento dropped the phone, racing out of his comfortable little room, knowing that he would never be able to salvage his job.
But perhaps he could save his life.
He ran as fast as he could to the entrance. He would say he wanted a smoke and that one of the nurses had told him to take it outside. The front guards wouldn't question it if he brought the psychos in, they'd let him out and then he'd be gone. He'd leave and never look back, find himself some little armpit of a town and hole up there. He had enough money to live happily on, enough money so that when he died it would be with booze in his belly and a paid whore in his arms.
He turned the corner and ran into the devil himself.
"Mr. Kento," Came the paper thin voice that sent chills down his spine each time he heard it, "May I ask why you are causing such a ruckus in my facility?"
Kento opened his mouth to say something, to excuse himself and run away as fast as his portly legs could carry him but the alarms started blaring, meaning that the intruders were now close enough to the facility to trip the final alarm only meant for emergencies and cause a panic.
"Ah, intruders!" He squeaked, trying not to meet the man's cold eyes directly. "There are intruders!"
"Yes. I can see that. Why weren't we given any other warning than this annoyingly obnoxious alarm?"
Sweat began to roll uncomfortably down the guard's spine and yet those eyes that pierced him so unmercifully made him want to shiver from the ice that the spread over his soul. He just couldn't understand it; how could he be sweating when he was so unbearably cold? "Th-They cut the phone lines, Sir." The elderly man sighed and shook his head, motioning with his hand.
"Really now, they wouldn't have gotten close enough to do anything if you had been doing your job correctly." There was a sudden breeze and Kento suddenly found it impossible to breathe. His mouth gaped open and closed, desperately trying to get the needed oxygen to his brain. But he couldn't. He just couldn't.
He fell down to the ground, eyes wide as they stared up at the pale face of the devil himself, the final thing he carried over with him to the other side the sight of those cold and unfeeling eyes staring down at him as if he were nothing more than a speck of dust.
Looking down at the dead body of the idiotic security guard, the Doctor reminded the lifeless corpse of one thing, "It is not Sir, Mr. Kento. It is Doctor." Truly, that bothered him just as much as the buffoonery which led to this situation.
"Nurse Kay, that was a very precise incision. You should be proud." He said, speaking to one of his ever dutiful followers, referring to the cut across the security guard's jugular. The tiny woman bowed, honored at the doctor's praise, though her viciously cold eyes didn't show it. "Thank you doctor. Shall we start the transfer of the patients?"
"No."
"Then," She hesitated, not used to questioning her leader, but also not used to this new plan of action. "Will we leave them here for the trespassers?"
The doctor smiled, though it was questionable that such a forced curl of frozen lips could ever be called a smile. "What kind of man would that make me to give up all of my priceless research so easily? No, we will simply have to lay all of the patients to rest since they will be nothing but dead weight as we leave. Though it is a pity since I have not done all of the research that I wished to."
The nurse's brow furrowed as she tried to figure out how it would be more time saving to kill each of the patients individually. "Doctor, how do you propose we do such a thing? There are well over a hundred patients here." The man sighed, tiring of the woman's incessant questioning.
"In the control room there is a switch that will release a toxic gas into the vents that lead through the cells. This chemical will boil their blood and turn their internal organs to –for lack of a more refined term- mush. We flip this switch and we will have ample time to escape while they waste their time searching through the cells, perhaps killing themselves in the process as they breathe in the toxins."
The nurse nodded, berating herself for ever doubting him. "Yes, of course Doctor."
All of the nurses and lower level doctors hurried about the facility, grabbing data and test results, burning that which they did not need to take but did not want the invading enemy to have. Nurse Kay hurried past them, holding her dear leader's orders close to her heart.
Go into the control room and go to the panel beneath the screen that shows the map of the facility. Flip the three black switches that lay at the bottom on the switch board and then turn the knob above them all the way to the right until you hear a click. The screen will load up the ventilation system, the green vents showing which ones are in proper working order. Wait until all of the ventilation shafts have turned green and then come to the hidden escape and leave.
Nurse Kay, dutiful until the very end, did as her master bid, watching the screen with a desperate intensity as she fought her automatic urge to run for the exit. The doctor had asked her to continue to stand there and so that was exactly what she would do, even if the blaring alarms urged her to reconsider.
After all, she could ignore alarms. What she could not ignore, however, was the sudden explosion that shook the facility as the enemy came in. Breath hitching she quickly turned and ran, leaving the room just before a single vent glowed red on the screen.
"Oh, this is sooo gross!" Declared the mist nin, looking down at the body she had "borrowed". Her clan's powers allowed them to take over the body of another person after knocking the person out with a specially made powder. It was a useful skill on infiltration missions since the user was open to any amount of memories from the body they took over. And though the skills were similar the clan was always protesting that they were in no way similar to the Yamanaka clan, those stupid leaf posers.
"What is it now Mimi?"
"This… this outfit, if you could call it that, mind you. It's… horrific. It's atrocious. It's-"
"It's a nurse's uniform, Mimi."
The woman looked at her partner drolly, a look that she managed to carry off regardless of what body she was in. "Really Senji, stop kidding. I've seen nurse uniforms and this is not one of them. It completely defeats the purpose of a nurse uniform! It's like wearing a nun's habit." The woman shuddered, the effect far more comical since she was in the body of a stern faced, librarian styled woman. Great merciful heavens, the chick even wore panty hose.
Who in their right mind under the age of forty still wore panty hose?
"Mimi," Sighed the small, pale haired man, "It's not that kind of nurse uniform. This is the kind they wear in actual hospitals." The woman's face contorted with shock and disgust.
"Seriously?" She asked, waiting for him to nod. "Well, I sure am happy that you're the one that heals my wounds whenever I get the crap beat out of me. I never want to see another one of these things ever again after I'm out of this body." The man sighed and wondered how on earth he had gotten stuck taking care of a fully grown woman like she was a child.
"Hey Butch, do you have my body?" She asked the third person of their little team. The man nodded silently and stood from his crouch, having to slouch down to be able to fit his whole height of seven feet in the narrow hall. A tiny and curvaceous blue haired unconscious girl was slung over the giant's shoulder, the large man handling the limp body with so much care that you'd think it were made of spun glass.
"Well, I'll be going then. See you guys later!" She called, hurrying through the hidden exit. The plan was for Mimi to infiltrate their ranks and stay with them until they could get a large team together to go in and capture them, following Mimi's chakra signature to find them when the time came.
The two men made their way through the hall to where the others in their mission team stood, talking to each other in hushed tones that seemed to suit the lowly lit stone halls.
"What is it?" Senji asked, Butch lurking protectively behind him just as he always did, looking like a vicious giant with the body of Mimi slung over his shoulder and the shadows of the hall hiding his face.
"We opened one of the doors to the cells and found poison. A lot of poison. If we search any farther we'll need to put on gas masks." A ninja who seemed to glow with just how pale he was -white hair, white skin, white clothes, and pale, icy blue eyes- said.
"And I say that we don't need to look! They'll just be as dead as the ones in the first room." This one was a thin boy with an attitude that far outreached his size, though he wasn't as short as Senji's five foot five.
The group continued to bicker back and forth before Senji clapped his hands together calmly, not allowing anyone to affect his endless patience. "As this mission's leader I will decide what we will do." The group stayed silent as they waited, eying the short man with an admiration and respect not many could have ever hoped achieve from such a rough group.
"We will search the rest of the rooms just in case. Butch, you stay here with Mimi's body and watch to make sure noting surprises us. Jun, get us those masks."
The white man nodded and they all quickly did as he bid, each of them trying to steel themselves against what they were undoubtedly about to find.
But it was useless.
Each cell they opened gave way to more and more viciously vile experiments. There was a room that held only children that they -for some ungodly and unknown reason- had sewn together, the little pairs holding each other for comfort in their last breathing moments, their skin marred by ugly black stitches and pale slashing scars. A room with cribs and incubators -even these still innocent lives were unable to remain untouched- held more horrors. Toddlers with golden ringlet curls and dimple dotted cheeks were connected to vicious looking machines, read outs and charts showing the chemicals had injected into them. Just to see if their tiny bodies could take it.
In one of the padded cribs lay what had to have been the prettiest child that the group had ever seen -fluffy black curls, eyelashes going on for miles, cheeks that still looked rosy even with out the flow of blood, and sweet little cupid's bow lips. She could have been the darling of her father's eye, the little girl vendors would give free things to just to get a smile. But instead she lay dead, never having seen the beautiful world that could have been hers -or anything, for that matter, since the depraved bastards had sewed her eyes and mouth shut.
They went through each and every cell, looking at every individual twisted and soul shattering sight until tears streamed down their faces. They never stopped -they knew that if they did they would never be able to finish, never be able to continue on if they gave into the need to stop even momentarily. At one point the other girl in their group -Yuu- braced her hands against the wall, throwing up as she closed her eyes and tried to wipe away the horrific images from her memory.
But her mind wouldn't let her. She would never be free of the horrendous images that would haunt her memories until the day she finally succumbed to death and it was the same for all of them. With every door they opened another piece of their hearts shattered away, with every unforgettable face they saw another tear fell, with every step they took to the end of the hall they aged another year. But they knew that they'd never stop, not until they had seen every last one of the victims. Not until they memorized each face so that they would know who's family they would be begging for forgiveness from when they tried to explain why they hadn't been faster.
Not when opening those thick metal doors to give their souls the freedom their bodies had been forced away from was the only thing they could do for them.
Shivering, Temari tried to curl into a tighter ball, closing her eyes against the cruelty of the death that she knew was coming. She could feel it in her bones, straight down into her soul. She knew that the end was coming and she couldn't decide if she wanted to greet it like a beloved friend or a detested enemy.
"Hey, Girly."
"Hm?"
"They've stopped screaming."
Temari bit her lip, closing her eyes as her cell mate threw the truth right in her face. God, oh God, the screams that had always flowed so easily on the air around them in their cell, the screams of madness and pain and terror, they were all gone. Disappeared. Snuffed out with a cruelty and a finality that twisted Temari's gut.
So this was how she was going to die. Would she ever see her family? Would she ever, one day, feel their thoughts turn towards her and how they had loved her once upon a time? Would she ever be able to rest easy without asking them the one desperate question that had played on a loop through her mind for all the years of imprisonment?
Shikamaru.
Asuma.
Kyoko.
Will you forgive me?
"You know," Screech started, his voice hitching suspiciously, "I always knew that I'd die in here in this cell, cold and chained to a wall like an animal. But I have to say, the fact that I'm not alone is making this pill a little easier to swallow. So, thank you."
"Dammit Screech, you bastard, you're going to make me cry, and I want to go out with a bit more dignity than a sniveling child."
"David." Temari blinked at the darkness.
"What?"
"My name is David. I figured that since we've been through all of this together and are about to die together you should at least know my real name." Temari forced the tears back, knowing that if they kept up with all of the mushy stuff she really would start crying.
"David, huh? I think I like Screech better." A chuckle broke the stale silence that lay heavy on the air.
"Yeah. My wife never called me by my real name either, though I think she just had more fun with what she called me."
"Wife? You said you forgot all about your past life."
"Ah, Girly, you never forget." He sighed, his voice cracking in a way that gave a hint of tears, "You never forget their faces or their smiles. They'll always be branded on our souls." The two sat in silence for a moment, finding themselves just simply waiting for the end that they had seen coming for years.
The bolt to the heavy metal door of their cell began to slide open and Temari wished that they were closer so that she could have to comfort of human touch for those last few moments she would be cursed to live.
"Hey Screech?"
"Hmm?"
"Will they forgive us?" She asked, closing her eyes as the ominous music of the mechanisms in the door working echoed miserably in her ears.
"Oh God," Screech whispered, so uncharacteristically quiet for the usually crazy and loud man. "Oh dear God I hope so."
The last cell. They were finally, mercifully, at the last cell.
Swallowing the bile that coated their throats and filled their mouths the team pulled the heavy metal door open with leadened arms, the ghosts of the past cells already weighing heavily on their souls. But they would finish this. They would open this one last door and then try and seal the images of this hateful day away into the deepest hollows of their hearts.
The door swung all the way open and they stared into a depthless darkness that almost seemed to swallow up all of the light and happiness that the world dared to have. Pulling out their flashlights they swept them in slow and reluctant arcs over the stone floor, hesitant to actually see what waited for them.
The beams of light touched upon a slim foot first, dirt covered and cracked. The lights trailed up over thin legs and protruding ribs, over uneven scars and angry stitches and up to a hollow cheeked face with two wide and shadowed green eyes that stared at the unknown intruders.
"Oh, oh God," Yuu whispered, "She's alive. She's actually alive."
The group felt their breath catch and their hearts clench as they looked at her and sent up silent prayers, their knees going weak as they stared upon the silent prisoner, the only survivor and hope they had found in the hell they had been forced to infiltrate. Senji walked around to stand so that the woman wouldn't have to squint blindly against the glaring light of the flashlights to try and see them.
"Hello? Can you understand us? You don't have to be afraid." He began, speaking in low and soothing tones, keeping his hands visible so that she would be able to see that he meant her no harm.
"You're not any of the nurses or doctors." She said, her voice low and raspy, cracking on some of the syllables as if she hadn't had a drink of water in eons.
"We're not. We are ninjas from the hidden village of the mist and we were sent here on a mission to infiltrate this facility and capture those who run it. And we came to save you." He said, feeling the strength in those final words. All of that pain, all of that mind destroying madness that had filled all of those other cells, maybe it could all be soothed by the balm of saving this one life. Maybe with this they could begin to forgive themselves.
The woman closed her eyes tightly, holding those words close to her heart and warming her chilled soul. "Screech, did you hear that?" She murmured, desperately trying to savor all of the emotions that were racing through her, emotions she had long thought dead and gone.
"Every word." The group jumped at the unexpected second voice, the beams of their flashlights moving in wild arcs as they tried to find the source.
"We're leaving." She whispered, tears beginning to slip unashamedly down her cheeks, "We're going home." She sagged against the wall bonelessly, her trembling hands going up to touch her lips, as if she just couldn't believe that such beautiful words had actually passed her lips.
And with tears of pure relief and hope racing down her cheeks she tilted her head back, and -for the first time in nearly ten years- she laughed.
Ahh... Finally.
Okay, do you see that last part? Huh? Guess what I did in one of my moments of infinite wisdom? I deleted the original version of it by accident. Yeah, you read that right.
I deleted it because that's how bad I suck.
You see, I use a little USB drive thing (Yes, I know that's probably not what it's actually called, but I'm crazy so I can call it what I want) so that I can work on my stories when I'm out of the house because I can't take my computer with me everywhere. So I managed to finish this part out of the house and I came home so ecstatically happy, and I plugged it into my computer and accidentally saved the old version over the newer version.
Aren't I smart?
But I managed to remember the skeleton of those last few paragraphs, so it really isn't that bad.
This was for my sweet little baby Ninquelot who has been asking for this for a little while and has been patiently waiting like the precious darling he is. He also sent me a private message (My first one, isn't that just fabulous?) to give me support, which urged me to finish the second part as quickly as possible (I mean, I just flew through typing those last pages).
Love you all!