This chapter contains little to no spoilers for the Force Awakens. TW: Suicide mention.
Three more times did Gin try to find a way out of capture - and none of the three were for escape. She didn't have the resources, the allies, the stability, or the manipulative abilities to try to return to the life she'd been leading only hours before. Unless the fates simply bent to her will for reasons unexplained, the poor woman was trapped for an indefinite amount of time until she was likely executed.
Long hours were spent in heavy deliberation, trying to make a decision that she'd already made once before. She was never one to take an action that would paint her with false cowardice, but it seemed to be the only plausible option in her situation. It wasn't so much as an instinct, but a learned behavior. She had always been taught - regardless of the generally positive atmosphere she'd grown up in - that death by one's own hands was better than death by another's. Over the next several days, Ginovae tried to finish what she'd started back when she was stuck in that mud pit.
Committing inconspicuous suicide was something impossible, she was beginning to learn, especially being that there were cameras built into her depressingly tiny prison cell. She was itching with near-constant fear, more of her enemies than of herself. They would torture her, watch her bleed. They would enjoy it. She wanted to take that away from them as quickly as possible. Gin wanted to die on her own terms.
The first attempt was less of an attempt and more of a future investment. She stopped eating. Unfriendly soldiers would drop a tray of unappetizing food off for her, and she would send it back untouched. When threatened with force, only two days after beginning her fast, Gin tried to hide the food or make it appear that she had eaten some. They were not fooled. She was force fed twice daily as a consequence.
The second attempt was quite erratic, and occurred shortly after having a plastic tube shoved down her throat for several minutes straight as an unhappy-looking man squoze blended concoctions into her stomach while two other unhappy men held her down. She'd wrenched the fragile bed-frame apart, content to see the uncomfortable metal sheet in shambles as she attempted to fashion a blade out of the parts. The privileges to her cot were quickly revoked, and she was made to sleep on the icy steel flooring.
The third attempt was easily intercepted, as the guards had been keeping a much closer eye on her behavior. She'd been heavily sedated once again after attempted to strangle herself with her own clothes. News of her unrelenting need for the worst sort-of escape spread quickly among the soldiers aboard the carrier ship, and with such infamy came the scrutiny of higher-ups. As it turned out, she'd only made her situation worse.
The thick metal door behind her swung wide open, two stormtroopers entering to remove her from confinement. What they found, however, was as exasperating as it was unusual. She was not moving, she was not struggling, and she wasn't screaming wildly as the only control she had was ripped away from her - control of her life. Gin was lying complacently on the ground, her stomach cold from the metal paneling beneath it. The woman's neck was cocked uncomfortably to the side, her mouth hanging ajar. For a minute, the soldiers were concerned that she really had killed herself.
"Stand up, prisoner," One of the two commanded, stepping forward to rouse her from her semi-conscious state, "We're moving you."
She didn't move. She didn't respond. She did, much to their relief, blink weakly at the wall in front of her.
The other one spoke up, his voice more forceful than the one before, "Are you deaf? We told you to get up. Don't make this any harder than it has to be."
The tense silence that followed was broken quite alarmingly by a gurgle rising from the woman's chest. They reached forward to check on their recent captive, both assuming that she was choking, but were stopped by the sound's escalation.
Gin was giggling. Quite uncontrollably.
And she layed there, chortling grossly for several moments, earning only confusion from the two soldiers. Her giggles ascended in pitch, in range, in decibel. The shrieks of laughter alerted the outside guards, who quickly responded. Several stormtroopers stopped in their rounds to see what the psychopathic prisoner was getting up to now.
But the strange events aboard the carrier ended with a disappointing, anticlimactic snort. Gin's lips widened into a lopsided grin, and she angled her neck to get a better look at the armed men in the room. "... I can't move," She slurred, her words slopping and spilling from her mouth like the currents of a polluted creek.
The men grabbed a hold of her arms, feeling the unresponsiveness in her limbs. She started cackling again, evidently at the strange sensation in her muscles, and the soldiers hoisted her up themselves, dragging her out of the cell and back down the vaguely familiar hallways of the ship. Her head lolled uselessly to the side, her neck unable to support the weight of her cranium.
Somewhere, a medic made note to administer less sedative to his patients - willing or otherwise.
Gin, being hardly present for the trip out of her cell, remembered absolutely nothing of the voyage onto what appeared to be another ship, perhaps a larger one. She could not tell. They left her in a mostly empty room, save for a sinister-looking chair that she promptly passed out in after being strapped down - with much difficulty, being that she was one-hundred and twenty-five pounds of dead weight at this point.
She awoke quite abruptly, searing pain wracking through her occipital bone. Her eyes opened wide, retinas for once singing the praises of the dim lights that she'd been forced to deal with for the past - what was it? A week? Gin simply couldn't tell anymore. Spatial reality set in at an alarming rate, and she realized that she wasn't alone in the room.
Her jaw tensed with anticipation, but she did not dare move - partly because she was afraid that she couldn't, and partly because she was afraid of what she'd find if she tried to look around the slightly more roomy prison cell. It wasn't as if the strange collar of the chair she'd been strapped to was good for peripheral vision anyways. She swallowed thickly, her fists clenched. It wasn't hard to notice the figure she was sharing the room with. They weren't exactly trying to hide from her - being that they stood, in essence, directly in her line of sight.
Ginovae would not acknowledge them. She wouldn't have to, and she knew that. They'd make their presence known as they saw fit. The only thing she had control of was herself. The only thing she had control of was herself. The only thing she had control of was herself.
She didn't even have that, as it turned out.
"I was informed that you have attempted suicide several times since your capture," An icy, metallic voice stated, effectively breaking through the misty mental haze that the woman had begun to create between herself and the situation she was being forced into. The opposing figure paused, waiting for a reaction from Gin, which she was too apprehensive to give.
Evidently they didn't mind waiting another several moments for her to respond, which resulted in her giving only a stiff, hesitant nod. She stared with petrification at the wall just to the right of her new conversation partner, hoping that if she didn't look in their exact direction, they simply would cease to exist. By the imposing stature that they stood at, and the dark garb they were dressed in - this was someone who meant business, and not the good kind.
The heavy sound of a deep, slow inhale came from the stranger before he spoke again, "That is… Pathetic. Cowardly."
Ginovae wasn't sure if she valued this person's opinions at all, but the words stung nonetheless. The fruitless struggle that she suffered through in that blasted cell had been pathetic, it had been cowardly. Hadn't it? It was even more pathetic that she hadn't succeeded in the one thing that would've saved her from all this pain. She did not comment on the individual's scathing insults. Anything she said would be her own way of consoling herself in the long-run.
The shrouded figure stalked closer to her, making her muscles tense to the point of cramping. Gin was sure that it would take a crowbar to pry her closed fists open again. She sweated anxiously, still making an effort to look anywhere else but the person in front of her, whom she was beginning to assume was a man. Women of wide-shoulders and narrow hips were few and far between, though not completely elusive. The seemingly deep - though somewhat robotic - voice that came from their… Helmet was pointedly male, however.
Thoughts of gender identification filled her head as she grasped for distractions. There was a high likelihood that she would be slaughtered in this room with little regard to her screams, and she was hoping to be mentally clocked out when that happened.
On the other hand, the short-fused male was already growing tired of this foolish woman's skittish mannerisms. She had the look of an animal stuck in a tractor beam, and the dignity of a disgraced veteran. It was obnoxious, it was pitiful, it was frustrating. He grew closer to her side, his hand reaching out to clasp the girl's jaw in his hands that dwarfed her face in proportion. Her expression did not change as he turned her to look at him, and he got the feeling that she still wasn't paying attention. His grip tightened on her cheeks, and he could feel her teeth grinding against each other in silent protest.
Gin's metacarpal muscles began to spasm and twitch with the force she was using to keep herself still, and water welled up in her eyes as she felt her tissues shift beneath the man's fingers. If she wasn't present before, she definitely was now.
Now that he had her attention, however, he did not want it anymore. While he was vaguely - vaguely - impressed by her ability to keep herself from reacting beyond mere twitches, the woman was proving to be incredibly boring. He released her face from his hand, and she held eye contact with him for only a few more breaths before turning her petrified face back to the wall she'd been previously staring at. His exhales grew ragged with exasperation at her noncompliance. It would be so simple to infiltrate that fragile mind of hers - but the satisfaction would be almost entirely absent from him.
"... You are of no use to me like this," The man announced flippantly, very nearly stomping his way around the intricate chair, and coming even closer to knocking the heads of the stationed guards together.
The room fell into silence again, and stayed that way for several more hours.
Gin was beginning to feel her blood sugar dropping dramatically, and the walls around her were beginning to swim with the unsteadiness in her sinuses. She was almost positive that her previous collide with the table had given her a severe concussion, but she was unlikely to receive any real medical attention here - aside from sedation, that is.
Furthermore, she was an incredibly social creature, born into a family - biological and otherwise - that seemed to be larger than the galaxy itself. She was never alone. Never alone. Never alone. Until now, that is. And it was wrenching apart whatever shreds of sanity and patience she had left, if there was any left at all.
In her desperation, she angled her head towards the stormtrooper standing just behind her, barely able to catch a glimpse of the shiny buckethead that all of the Republic's soldiers sported. It was almost comforting to see something familiar, something she knew she'd bested in the past. Her lips parted, searching for words to say - words that wouldn't get her in more trouble than she was already in.
After sweating over her introductory sentence for several minutes, Gin finally spoke, her voice even more scraggly and dusty than usual, "... So, uh… Who was that guy?"
The stormtrooper looked stunned - if a masked individual could looked stunned - both at her idiocy and at the fact that she'd asked anything at all. They decided to humor the captive woman, at least for a moment. She probably wouldn't be long for this world anyways. "The man who spoke to you? His name is Kylo Ren," The soldier replied stoically, not removing his own gaze from the position on the wall that he himself had chosen to focus on, "It would be wise not to test his patience if he so chooses to speak to you again."
Ginovae almost entirely ignored the last part of his answer, already knowing that she was pressing her luck with the imposing figure. "What did you say the name was?" She asked again, her jarred head having trouble recognizing sounds in the first place, let alone without masks covering the mouths of those she was trying to communicate with.
The stormtrooper repeated themselves with the same amount of steel as before, showcasing his proper training, "Kylo Ren."
She swallowed thickly, still not having heard the enemy soldier. "One more time?"
"Kylo. Ren."
"Kyro Len?"
"Kyro. Len-," They cut themselves off, realizing that they'd simply repeated the women's mistake with embarrassing tenacity, "His name is Kylo Ren. You may call him Kyro Len if you wish for your lifespan to be shortened considerably."
Gin just nodded, not wanting to aggravate the guard any further. She made a mental note of his tip, however. A quick death was better than the slow, inevitable one she was currently enduring.
There was nothing that caused as much despondency in a person than looking down the tunnel and finding no light there.
"And all that's left is a blind reflection. You see what's coming, and you regret it." - The Milk Carton Kids
Thank you to okgurl87, acosytoken, xAtlanta, and two guests for leaving reviews, and to any and all who followed and favorited. I'm glad some of you are as excited about this story as I am! - Marina