A/N: Okay, so I went away for a week at the beginning of August, with every intention of posting the rest of these as soon as I got back. Clearly life had other ideas =) Here's a double drabble, anyway.
Prompt Prison. Posted in original format 13/7/07.
In a strange way, Elizabeth welcomes the cold stone of the floor beneath her and the cool, immovable iron at her cheek. Not that she enjoys her imprisonment: prisoners' leers and the stench of unwashed bodies—including, she suspects, her own—make her situation anything but pleasant.
Yet after all, she has been a captive all her life, shackled by the weight of silk and expectation. Only in a few snatched moments has she revelled in the illusion of freedom: in the exhilaration of shouting orders upon the deck of a doomed ship, the wild joy of dancing barefoot upon fire-lit sand, the thrill of furiously stolen kisses, the seductive intensity of steel whispering on steel. All else has been a silver cage of stifling propriety, as impervious to the rebellious beating of her wings as these bars are to the angry shaking of her fingers. Now, at least, her incarceration is physical, acknowledged; one that she is not expected to endure with a smiling façade of contentment—one against which she can fight.
For nineteen years her mind and spirit have been chained; now her body joins them in a different kind of prison.
She will escape them all.