Thanks for reading! A bit of brief information before you dive into the story: The beginning is a bit slow-moving, but is needed for character and plot development. Also, even though this story is marked as Loki/OC it will take some time for connections to start. I hope you enjoy.
Her day started exactly the same as it had for the past fifty years. She woke up on a bed that was little more than a rug and covered in a thin sheet that did almost nothing to protect her from the cold of the room. There was nothing to tell her what the time of day it was and her internal clock had long been disconnected. For all she knew it was the middle of the night, or the sun could be high in the sky.
The sound that woke her was a metal tray hitting the floor of her concrete cell, and it was the sign of the start of another cycle she called a day. Her opening eyes were the only movement she made despite the blinding lights. There was no point in hurrying to the food that only tasted of cardboard. It was cold anyway. She couldn't remember the last time she had hot food.
She waited for something, anything, to happen. But just like the past 18,000 days, no one came to rescue her. No one would ever come to rescue her. Instead, the cycle of the day continued. Nothing would break it. But today, she didn't get up like she normally did. Instead, she lay there, her dull red hair a tangled mess around her.
She had tried so hard to escape at the beginning, not letting her small stature deter her from trying to intimidate some of the guards that had been posted to her cell all that time ago. She had planned her escapes piece by piece. Years of thinking every step through, exploring each scenario she could think of in case something went wrong. But it was as if they were watching her, could read her mind. Every time she got close to executing her plan, she was shoved into another cell, a different one nothing like she had been in before. She never could figure out how they always knew.
She wasn't a patient person, but having spent years devising escape plan after escape plan made her realize that sometimes the right opportunity was something worth waiting for. Especially when she was moved from place to place so often.
The marks she had made on the walls had been lost. She tried to remember each day, tried to number them, write them down. But the number slipped from her head as the food became less nourishing and she started to starve. By the time she had entered her third cell, she had completely lost track of the days. But she didn't have a choice. When she compared the rest of her life to the time she had spent in cell after cell, she estimated it to be about 50 years.
Her entire day was in this cell, staring at the walls, trying to think of any way to escape, even if it was just for a moment. But every day she ate the cold, slimy, cardboard, drank the water that tasted like metal, and slept on the rug that seemed to steal her body heat.
When her stomach finally rumbled enough and started cramping in protest, she got up, her body weak from the lack of proper nutrition. She crawled to the spot her tray had been pushed to, only a foot away from her would-be bed, and nibbled slowly on the grey block of squishy, slimy sludge. The woman had noticed, early on, if she took her time eating the portions of the meal that was fed to her, the less time she would have to sit and wait and think the day away. She chewed each nibble twenty times, swallowed, and repeated until the block of food was gone. Then she would take a turn with the water, drinking it one sip at a time, mostly so she didn't cause herself to be sick after the cardboard taste that seemed to stick in her mouth. She swished the water around for several seconds, replacing the food taste with the metal one.
It was a long process, but she needed it to cope. She knew that the speed she ate at was the only thing she could really control about her day. There was nothing else that she had a say in. When the woman had finished, she pushed the tray up against the little door in the actual door to the cell, so the person who came by to collect the tray would just take it and leave. She had no interest in talking with anyone who had kept her locked up for a fourth of her life. She didn't even want to see them.
A little while later, when the tray door was unlatched, a hand popped through, grabbed the tray quickly, and the door was locked again. The woman had tried grabbing the hand once and in turn she had almost lost her own. She had gripped the man's hand tightly and yanked on it as hard as she could. The man hadn't been completely thrown off by her attack, but she had been able to get a good grip on his fingers. But, despite her usually quick reaction time and because of her weakened body from the less nutritious food, the man had pulled her arm completely through the hole and she felt a sting as the skin of her wrist was pierced by a blade. She had squeezed a little tighter, and the knife cut a little deeper into her wrist, blood flowing freely over her hand. She let go, knowing there was no way she would be escaping that day.
An infection had developed in the wound because she didn't take care of it the way she should have. Eventually, the infection and sickness because of it was so bad she passed out from the fever that swept over her body only a few days later. When she woke up, there had been a bandage over the cut, and while she felt weak, she didn't have a fever and the pain from the infection was gone. That had been her last desperate attempt at escape. After that, she gave up.
So now she watched the hands, sometimes a woman, sometimes a man, put in and take out tray after tray. It was the only real way she had to mark the passage of time. She took naps in between meals, now weaker as the portions of food grew smaller and smaller. It had been happening over a period of what had to be a few months, and she was sure they didn't think she would notice, but she did.
It reminded her of the first five years she had spent as a prisoner. Test after blood drawl after test had been performed on her, learning everything they could without actually cutting her open. She was confused as to why they had decided to test her again. They were pushing her to the limit, finding out how many calories she would need before she became so weak she couldn't function. But why now? Why start the tests anew? There was really no reason that she could think of. She had been here for so long. They had had ample time to test every theory they may have thought of. Why now?
The woman, after sitting for hours contemplating about the food, her blue eyes staring unseeing at the wall, finally decided it didn't matter. Eventually, they would push her to her limits, and finally, they would push past them. Once they did, she would make sure that they didn't get what they wanted. She would be slowly starved, her body would break down pieces of itself, slowly eating away at any fat she had left, then her muscles, then, finally, organs that her body was dependent on.
The woman had been on the cusp of starvation before, and it was not something she wished to experience again. But, there was something she could do, something she had considered a long time ago when she thought she had no alternatives. She would have to suffer through starvation if it came to that. But she could limit her suffering, even if it would only last for a few hours at a time. And eventually, those hours would grow longer, and even longer, until eventually there would be nothing for her to wake up to.
That was the last resort, she hadn't approached those thoughts since the beginning of her captivity. But she was ready for this to end. These last fifty years had changed the redhead in ways that she had never imagined possible, even when she began to discover how different she really was. What she had been through…
She herself was unsure as to how she survived. The only thing she could guess was that the strange things that seemed to happen to her, things that she had discovered over time, had allowed her a way to adapt to terrible things that normal humans would never have lived through. She had had many breakdowns over the years. In the beginning, it had been from the pain. The torture they had inflicted on her had caused certain parts of her brain to shut down, to not have to deal with the pain. It had taken her twenty years to recover from the torture they inflicted on her for over five years.
After that twenty years, she had recovered enough to finally, completely, come back to her full self. She would never be the same she knew, the scars, both physical and physiological, ran much too deep for her to ever fully recover. But she had been able to start to plan again, for her mind to function at a normal level instead of the survival mode she had been forced to live in.
But, the thirty years after that had been worse in many ways. For thirty years, she had been moved place to place, never really aware of where she was, who was taking her to the next cell, or if she would ever escape. She had given up hope of rescue long ago when the loneliness had started to set in.
The loneliness, that was the worst part. For over forty-five years, the only touch she could remember was a cruel one. They only wanted to hurt her. They cared for her most basic needs: food, water, shelter. But there was another level of need that every person required, one that she had been refused. At least at the beginning she had some form of human contact, something other than a hand reaching in and out of a cell to give her food. But now, after her torture, the only human contact she had was when they were moving her. And that wasn't enough to survive, or at least it wouldn't have been for a normal human. But the woman had known for a long time that she wasn't normal, that she may not even have been human at all.
And just like that, her day started to end as it had for the past fifty or so years, with limited variation. Once a week, a door would open from inside her tiny cell, and a small shower would appear. Time was limited, and the woman quickly stripped her clothes, standing under the cold water, and letting it wash over her. She scrubbed and cleaned as best she could, knowing that she was probably going to have to skip using the bar of soap to wash her hair to make sure that other parts of her body would be clean. She didn't mind so much though. She had been much dirtier for a much longer time than a couple of weeks.
But after drying off and putting on the fresh clothes that were provided to her this week, she climbed back into her bed, not even having the energy to wait for the food that always came after her shower. The woman was so exhausted that only a few moments after she lay down, she was asleep.
In the same building, but on a different level, a young woman listened as two high up officials discussed the red-headed prisoner that was displayed on three different monitors in the surveillance room.
"She's one of them, isn't she? Like what we saw in New Mexico."
"From the past records we can only guess," answered a man.
"How long has she been here?" The first speaker, a woman, asked. Her voice wasn't full of curiosity, she just simply wanted the information to make an informed decision on how threatening the woman was.
"There are no records for when she was first captured, but she has been here longer than I have. Longer than anyone who has ever worked here."
There was a pause and the young woman listening to their conversation was suddenly filled with curiosity. And sadness.
"And the reason for her continued imprisonment?"
"No one knows. I haven't met a person yet who knows who she is. The only thing I can guess is that she may have some sort of information that could avoid a repeat of New Mexico."
"Does she have a name?" The woman asked, and the young woman paused in her surveillance to listen more closely, making sure she wouldn't miss it.
"She has only ever been referred to as Sigyn."