AN: I know I left y'all hanging last time! Thank you for your thoughts. They keep me going... I spent some studying time (whoops) whipping this together for you. Lots of love and don't worry, it's raining now but eventually it won't be!
PAST
EPOV
I ricochet off the four walls, pacing and pulling at my hair. This cannot be fucking happening. Where am I, how the fuck did I get here, how do I get out… my mind is racing.
I'm naked, which is not the worst of it but it ranks. I see those fucking video cameras and I don't like the idea of some sick shit watching me. I tried to tie a blanket into a toga of sorts, but my new… my new GODDAMN COLLAR kept me from that. I don't think it burned my skin but it sure felt like fire.
The room is deceptively simple. Three mirrored walls, one transparent that keeps me from my neighbor. I feel imperfections in the far wall that suggest a door. There is a spout and a drain, a toilet, a simple bed. A knife. The fucking cameras. A speaker.
And a girl.
She has been watching me since I woke from my… I wasn't fucking sleeping. I can't remember much from just before here… before I was taken? But I think I must have been drugged. My skull still feels like it's in a vice… a fog too, I cannot see or think clearly.
My temper is flaring again, and my nostrils as my head whips to her. It's so fucking maddening, the way she is just sitting and waiting. For what? She must be a prisoner here with me. Her room is identical, and she is quite naked.
I know the gentlemanly thing to do would be to avoid looking directly at her, exposed. But she stares at me so boldly, like she's daring me to look. Bitch.
The thought surfaces so quickly it takes me aback, but I feel as though I may explode and her face is so fucking blank. I sigh unsteadily and resume running my fingernails along the seams that I think indicate a door. I am beginning to wear my skin raw, but there's not much else-
A shock.
Of fucking course. It's a little one compared to what I know this unseen asshole has got for me, it's just a little prod- 'hey. I'm still watching'- I understand the sentiment as clearly as if it was shouted in my ear.
Back to the wall, I slide down the wall and fall onto my ass. Fuck it all. I'm not getting out anytime soon, this is clear.
The wall begins to rise.
The transparent glass wall, I mean. It's sliding up and I'm on my feet quickly. Her room is just like mine but I want to go in and see if there's some way to escape hers.
I slow, though. She has a collar too. But there's a… a dog dish on the floor. Her bed has no sheets. There is a metal cage in her room, but it's so small that…
I feel like I'm looking into an animal's pen. I think that I am, in some way.
She stands, and the sight of her all at once makes me weak in the knees in the worst way.
Her arm hangs just so, at a slightly… wrong angle from her body. She is very slender, but her figure is undiminished by the way her bones seem to curve out of her skin. Her hair is honestly the color of dried blood and it's so curly it has a life of its own. Her eyes, green and piercing, burn into mine although I cannot yet meet them.
Her skin is covered in black and blue… bruises in the strangest… handprints, I think. There are wounds on her stomach, on her breastbone… some open and weeping, others healing, some weeks old. Her nose is crooked though I do not think it's some charming feature. She has had untreated broken bones, here. And I understand.
I am not leaving anytime soon. And whoever was here before me did this.
"Who… who the fuck…"
She lifts her finger to her lips, quieting me. For all her injury, she looks like a goddess. I gulp and nod. She points to the camera, and I understand. Whoever keeps us here can hear us.
She sits on the bed with catlike grace, and bids me closer to her. She pats the mattress beside her, and I am quick to sit there. I feel like a young boy, but I need to know what this woman knows. It could keep me alive, help me keep her alive…
She gathers her hair, braids it quickly and deftly. She cups her hand to my ear- it's a hot hand, and my pulse quickens. Her breath is flaming against my skin, the shell of my ear, and she begins to whisper.
"Listen, closely. We can speak now but maybe not for a while after. I am Victoria."
I start, to answer, tell her I am Edward, but she hisses a "shhh" and I listen.
"Do what he says, obey best you can. It will keep you alive. It will keep me as unharmed as possible. I sure fucking hope you're a good guy, because as you can see the last one was overzealous."
I knew whoever was here before had done this to her. I could kill him-
"He is dead now. You will be dead if you are not careful. This is all I should say for now. Don't fucking speak."
CLOSER TO PRESENT
I can't stand to look over at her room, but I forget sometimes and my eyes stray. I see that mass of red, red hair that looks so dull now. It looks like clotted fucking blood. She lies, so still and prone, in her clotted blood and her clotted fucking blood fucking hair.
Fuck.
I feel like I haven't stopped crying since I first saw her like this. Her broken shell of a body…
No one can be beautiful dead. No one. There is no beautiful death, no lovely bones, no precious corpse. She is ugly now and her body got stiff and then it began to smell.
Her eyes thank God, turned away from my room. But I can see that unnatural half-gaping look through the mirror on her wall. She is looking at herself into eternity.
I can't sleep with her body in here. It feels like a final insult to me. Some part of me always hated her, hated her because I could not protect her. I could not protect her from myself.
I think of her pussy and vomit.
She was such a sexual creature, such a vixen up to the end. She didn't know what he wanted from her, at first would get upset and have me pull out. She and I, writhing, shocked silly, shocked our fucking brains out. But she didn't want to get pregnant, didn't understand she didn't get to fucking WANT THINGS here.
Victoria was doomed before she got here. She could not submit. She thought she would play this game, take things standing up, outsmart him somehow.
But her belly grew tight and she began to swell with child. Our baby. When she finally realized that something had taken up residence within her… she fucking lost it.
She threw herself against the faucet, spigot thing whatever it was in our room. She pummeled her abdomen, in between the teeth-grinding bone-breaking skin-flaming shocks he dealt to her. He lifted the wall and told me to restrain her, but it was like she was possessed.
Blood trickled from between her legs. He told me to snap her neck.
She looked me in the eyes and begged me to kill her.
It wasn't hard, to be honest.
The harder part was her gasping and unnatural stillness afterwards. A broken bird. A bird whose wings cannot communicate with its brain anymore. I brought her head down on the ground, hard, after a moment.
I could not refuse.
The man who had been here before me had taken pleasure in what the voice asked of him. He had delighted in torturing Victoria, raping her. She didn't know for how long, but he turned out impotent. She woke up to him lying quietly dead in his own room. She wasn't sure how the voice had killed him.
Victoria wanted me to stay so that I could guide the next girl. Show her how to live here. How to survive, waiting for rescue. She grew to know me, grew to understand that cut after cut broke my heart. Having sex with her, though as consensual as possible, fucked with me. She watched me vomit after reopening one of her old wounds. She understood my aversion to this.
She told me I was perfect.
Victoria had reached the end of her rope. She could not stay here any longer; she could not handle the baby. And now her corpse is splayed accusatorily in the other room. I can almost hear it whispering to me. It knows I killed her. It thinks I shouldn't have.
I throw my face into my pillow and scream.
EVEN CLOSER TO PRESENT
The new girl won't stop making noise.
She screams and cries constantly. She wails at the walls, she beats her head against the wall and kicks me away whenever I come close.
She nearly bellows whenever she is shocked, not even that can quiet her long. She whimpers and cries out in her sleep. My ears ring.
I don't even know her name yet.
It has been some period of time since she arrived, but time has bled together with its usual fluidity. This fourth girl, this girl number four of mine, she is driving me absolutely… absolutely mad. I cannot hear myself think.
The wall begins to slide up, and sound now flows freely between our spaces, unfortunately. She glares at me with her watery brown eyes. She will not allow me to whisper to her, but I gave up all hope of avoiding the voice's attention when it came to her. I tried screaming back at her, but the shocks silenced me.
I cannot reason with someone who does not want to be reasoned with.
The voice crackles to life in my speaker, and his volume is maxed out so I can hear him clear as day.
"Edward, please cut out her tongue."
JUST BEFORE BELLA'S ARRIVAL
Tanya has told me she loves me.
Her hair is gold, spun cold, waves and it spills over my lap. Her eyes are the happiest blue… she peers up at me, bats her eyelashes, twists her legs together and swivels her hips. Her breasts, golden with rosy little buds, her hands pull my face down towards hers. She is like sunshine in this prison.
Her skin still glows with fading kisses from the sun of the outside world when I find her. She lays with her arms neatly folded over her ribcage; she looks so peaceful, my sunshine angel. Her hair, like a mane like water it flows down, down over her shoulders.
From beneath her clasped arms, streams of blood that are even still drying. They run little rivers over her cooling skin, her skin that will never again warm me. Her skin that still smelled like summer when she first came her, not so long ago, I KNOW that even though I cannot seem to think of time here and I just had so little with her I just had
I pulled her up into myself, her slender arm slips and drapes downward, the delicate flesh of her wrist flaps open and lies with the stillness of the newly dead.
I cannot bear another.
The next will survive.