Prologue
Two things I knew.
Pain. There was the kind they brought with them, taunting me with the light as they entered my dark little cell, before they snatch that away, too. More pain comes if I try to cry out. What does it matter anyway? There's no one to help me. No one who can help me, even if they cared enough to.
Then, even worse than that, was the pain he brought.
He didn't mean to. I couldn't believe it was deliberate—I didn't want to believe that. He never spoke, just sat in the opposite corner and watched me. Sometimes I could see him, too, when they would leave the slot open on the door, letting in a fragile stream of light. I didn't know if he was real. I didn't care. He might have just been a hallucination my mind conjured up calm me through the endless night. A part of me ached for him, desperately hoping that he could wash away that other pain, if only for a little while.
The few times he touched me alone were a kind of bittersweet agony.
And then there were the screams. The only sound that broke through the unending silence besides their voices. They pierced through the walls like a knife—brutal, bloody, damaging. And then they would stop, leaving only the cold, dead silence in their place.
The second thing I knew:
I was going to die. Tonight? Tomorrow? Did it matter? Was I dead already and this was only my own personal slice of hell?
I wanted to ask him that, the angelic hallucination in the corner. But the words were choked off in my throat, kept at bay by overwhelming fear—fear of more pain, fear of what his answer would be.
Fear that the sound of my voice would break the beautiful hallucination, and he would leave me here, alone, with them, with nothing to console me in the hours, days, weeks, until it was my turn to join the screams.
A/N: …Yeah, it's a bit short. I was trying to write my last few chapters of The Experiment, and this is what comes to mind.