violet:
Violet felt almost weightless, a guard on either side of her, their hands wrapped around her arms to carry her back to the cell. Her useless feet dragged and bounced along beneath her. Yes, she felt almost weightless, if not for the vice grip of pain blanketing her entire body. Her head lolled forward, chin banging against her chest. It had been… fuck, how long had it been? Hours? Days? She’d lost track of time after the third whipping. She wished she had the strength to tense against the pain, but her body was limp in the guards’ hands.
Water dripped down to the floor. She could just barely see it, unable to open her eyes more than a sliver from the exhaustion. Her hair was wet? A shaky breath left her lungs like fire. She remembered the water. What had it been? Some sort of waterboarding? No, that wasn’t right. It was… something with dunking. She could remember her face slamming into the water so fast and so hard that it felt quite solid indeed. No, it wasn’t that. It’d been ice. A thick layer of ice cubes floating atop the water. It had made it feel like her face was being slammed into a wall.
She barely had the strength to breathe, and she certainly didn’t have the strength to catch herself when the guards threw her back into her cell. She skidded across the floor until her back slammed into the wall. She barely flinched at the pain. What difference did it make to her, after all? Her back, her entire body, was already a mess of slashes and bruises, her tank top shredded and torn and wholly unable to cover it. Little more than a drop in a turbulent sea. Maybe that’s why they finally brought her back. She’d reached some ungodly threshold, and no torture method they had could beat her down any further.
As she lay shivering in pain, a trembling mantra looped through her mind. Your fault. Your fault. Your fault. It hadn’t worked, none of it had worked, and everybody had suffered because of what they’d done. What she’d done. She could still hear them telling her that, their voices coolly emotionless as they’d shackled her to a chair and beaten her until she didn’t have the strength to cry out. She wished she could pull herself to her cot, cover herself with her blanket and stay there until she withered to dust and blew away, but all she could do was tremble limply on the cold floor.
It was hard to discern how long she lay there, numb to the world, slipping in and out of consciousness and waiting for the strength to drag herself to her cot. Or waiting to die. If she could. But the former came to her first, as the pain began to ease just enough to give way to the terrible chill. Her muscles protested at the effort it took to drag her body across the floor, twitching and trembling the entire way, but she powered through.
She deserved it, after all.
Painfully, methodically, inch by inch, she shifted along the floor until she could reach the corner of the blanket hanging off the edge of her cot. It wasn’t until she had pulled herself into a vaguely upright position against the wall, the blanket draped haphazardly over her shoulders and piled into her lap, that she finally started to take notice of the sounds around her again. A voice, specifically. One that might have been directed toward her. Her cracked lips parted, preparing for words she couldn’t quite form. Defeated, she pressed them together once more, and dragged her empty gaze toward the voice.
There was a snap of something cruel inside Jackson when he laid eyes on the tiny human, a sharp break of confusion that dug into his sides and caused for a deep frown to crinkle his forehead. He remembered her; remembered that they’d briefly talked. He remembered her lovely face, her milky white complexion despite her dirty state, and most importantly, he remembered her pretty blue eyes. He’d come down here for the very same reason as usual and eventually decided to check up on her, see whether she’d be more approachable today.
But this.
This was the worst. The girl in front of him seemed like anything but the Violet from a couple of days ago and more like a ghost, a waning shadow of what she used to be. His gaze wandered over her body, considered the bruises and scratches which stretched across her frame like a mixture of purple and blue paint on a white canvas. It didn’t linger, however, and he elected not to stare at the evident marks mainly out of respect, setting on her eyes instead. They looked so empty, so dull. And it displeased him greatly.
He knew that quite a few slaves had been severely punished over the past days, and that some were still suffering. It made him wonder whether Violet had been one of them, one of those who attempted to flee. It wasn’t like him to feel so interested, so keen on getting to know more about the people who were caged inside the basements of Sapphire. He fucked them, that was about it. Nothing more, nothing less. And yet, here he was. Perhaps it was to blame on the way she carried herself, the fashion in which she looked at the world. It called out to him and struck a deep chord of his dominant side, a sentiment which he hadn’t felt for a long time thus got him intrigued.
He said her name, his voice stern and gruff for she seemed so out of it, somewhere far away. And when she didn’t approach him, Jackson hesitated. Once he realized that he got her attention, he continued, gentler this time. “C'mere, little one.” He gestured for her to come to the bars of the door. He had already paid the guards for a rental beforehand. All he needed to do was to wave his hand and she would be released. Maybe, though, she would want to stay here. So he waited.
