Interrogation was a mental process, psychological. The subject in question was nervous by nature, always antsy, ice under a white-hot sun and she kept the room silent purposely. It was stifling, suffocating; it erased any sense of normalcy by the absence of sound alone. The environment was white, sterile and vicious, a harsh, unforgiving splash of nothing that swirled endlessly, never stopped, and as she entered, the cream of her skin clashed horribly. Green blurred and bled against the backdrop of light and white, dragged outwards and twitched violently with every step she took.
There were soldiers one minute and orders for them to leave the next; he was bound by the wrists, arms roughly twisted at his back, all with his neck situated upright by a loosely adjusted rope to ensure he had no way of inflicting injuries on himself. He was trapped like a rat; the thoughts unfurled her lips into a smile, something far too sharp for a word so soft.
When she peered down at the boy bound and small, so small in comparison to her towering form, she didn’t see a human, a child, but a thousand different faces, the stains of blood and flickers of humanity itself on fire beneath a sky dripping with gore. Bones laid asunder beneath a canopy of green trees wholly unfitting for such a sanguinary scene. Friends. Family. The collapse of their home, their cage shattered inwards, a grim reminder. Life and death and the loss of her own soul.
A finger lifted, tapped out a rhythm, one, two, three… One, two, three. Torture was psychological, expectation was a greater pain than anything the needles at her side could do, far worse than incisions, burns, salt poured into open wounds. Physically he could heal anything she threw at him. Mentally?
Mentally he was clay in her hands.
"I’m sorry that it had to end this way," and perhaps there is sympathy threaded beneath the drone of her voice, for the boy forced to play a hand far too big for his age. Maybe she sees herself, a weapon with a cause, a goal, but war is filled with shades of gray and she’s swam in that sea so long that the color has been drained from her veins.
She sees him through spectacles of red; only red, only blood.
Tap, tap, tap — the only noise in the room was her nail, the ever present tick aligned with the beat of her heart, maybe his. Hopefully his. “This will be much easier on all of us," and she pauses, raises her browline, quirks her lips in an implication she knows he’ll understand, "if you speak quickly and truthfully. Do you think you can do that for me, Bertholdt?”
Her voice is sweet, maternal; she addresses him by his first name to breed familiarity, breathe a sense of comfort to loosen his muscles for now. Unravel his barriers. The enemy is always a sheep in wolves clothing, but in this world, who is the enemy?
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