And Still, Part 12
No. 24 - ONE DOWN TWO TO GO
self-induced injuries to escape | flashback | revenge
This one gets.... rough. Read the tags at the end to decide if you want to read it; let me know if you want a summary that will skip over the self-induced injuries. This one is also really long, so for that and the "please read the tags in case you have triggers or squicks" I added a read-more. The tags have spoilers. CW: solitary confinement, referenced (obliquely) torture, sleep deprivation, mild (I think?) body horror, mouth horror, teeth.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11
Masterlist
“You get to rot in this cell until you change your mind.”
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Lynnura did not enjoy boredom.
She had never liked being bored. She had always wanted to move, to read, to learn, to do something; sitting around doing nothing was a foreign concept to her. Avery joked that she would only stay seated if someone was sitting on her. She liked having things to do, and she didn’t have the most patience.
Which meant that solitary confinement was a particular type of hell.
She had no one she could talk to, not even the guards who delivered her meals. She had nothing to do. They wouldn’t give her so much as a pencil to doodle with for fear that she would use it against them. (Which, to be fair, she would have. Pencil lead was just graphite; with enough concentration, she could control it.)
She needed to make a plan before she lost her mind.
She had to keep herself busy, stay focused, and figure a way out of here. Avery would be trying to break in to save her, and she needed to get out before that happened. She couldn’t let her beloved get anywhere near this place, near these people who considered her an expendable asset.
Lyn had been trained on how to deal with being held prisoner as part of her time with Heroes League: survive, evade, resist, escape. SERE. That training had always assumed that the hostiles would be villains of some sort, though, not a well funded and well known company like Corporation. A good bit of what she learned wouldn’t be applicable. She was more or less in a high tech, high security jail. They wanted information, but they were content to wait her out in solitary for it—for the moment. Whether they’d resort to torture eventually—well, she would learn that soon enough.
And she wouldn’t be doing anyone any good if she lost her head. She took a few deep breaths and focused on calming down.
Okay. She could do this.
First off: find any material she could manipulate with her powers. They had strip-searched her when she was first captured, and taken all of her little jewelry pieces and trinkets that doubled as tools she could use with her powers, so she had to find new sources. Unfortunately, Corporation had planned this cell to be able to hold a geokinetic. Nothing here was rock or stone; it was all metal or plastic. As much as she would like to emulate the great Toph Beifong and suddenly be able to metalbend, she knew it wasn’t going to happen. She was even on a high floor, far enough away from the ground that she couldn’t sense it.
Why couldn’t they have been idiots and put me in an underground cell instead?
Okay. That was a bust for now. She would keep trying; maybe someone would be dumb enough to bring something she could use into the isolation zone around her cell. Implausible, but not impossible.
In the meantime, she would keep herself busy with whatever physical activity she could manage in such a small space. Push-ups, sit-ups, flexibility training, and anything else she could think of.
Lastly: figure out how well this place was monitored. It wouldn’t do to get her hands on material she could manipulate, just for it to be noticed on a camera and immediately confiscated.
This was going to be a challenge.
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By the time Marcus had come to pay her a visit, Lynnura had been subjected to sleep deprivation due to lights, sound, and temperature fluctuations, as well as a variety of stress positions. Nothing that would permanently harm her, but definitely enough to make her life even more miserable.
She had gotten lucky once on materials; a small piece of… something… had been brought into the very edge of her power’s radius. She had managed to get it halfway to her before it was caught. It turned out that one of the female lab techs had come to work wearing earrings with ceramic decorations; she had ripped them directly from the woman’s head, causing a good deal of damage. She heard the guards talking about it after they escorted her to one of her not-considered-torture-under-the-Geneva-Convention sessions.
She had to be smarter about how she did things. And as much as she hated that she injured someone, she needed to make peace with the fact that getting out of there might mean hurting more people.
Okay. So. Ceramics were new. Those meditation sessions were paying off after all. She had begun spending time each day meditating on her powers, on their reach and control, as a sort of practice without materials. Lyn had learned young that her powers were easier to control with daily practice, and had experimented with the upper limits of her powers for quite a while: how much she could manipulate at once, what all she could do with it, stuff like that. This was a different type of limit: how small of something could she control, how far away she could grasp it.
She had been experimenting with her fine control before, such as Avery’s ring; it took a good bit of concentration to be able to not only make a ring that was the perfect size, but also specific types of quartz. So she was familiar with the concept that “earth powers” could include more things than just throwing rocks around, but she hadn’t expected to be able to control ceramics.
That led her to an idea. A terrible, terrible idea that she wished she had never had; one that, in any other circumstance, she would have passed off as an intrusive thought and never considered again.
Here though, locked in this aggressively sterile and modern cell, she didn’t have the luxury of being squeamish.
Her idea was this: would bones be considered close enough to “earth” for her to control?
It was awful. She didn’t want to be able to do such things. Bloodbending was horrifying enough; she didn’t need to invent bonebending!
I am not turning myself into a kids show villain. I will not lose my morals over this. Even if this is possible, I will find a way to do it without hurting anyone with my powers.
Without any other sources, she experimented with herself. By now she knew all the cameras in her cell, and knew that she was being constantly monitored. She refused to give her captors any clue that she had come up with an idea for escape, so she kept with her same routines. She did all of her physical exercises, talked and sang out loud for her enjoyment and their annoyment, and finally came to her daily meditation session.
This is just a test, she reminded herself. She could figure out what bones she would be willing to sacrifice to the cause after she learned if this would even work. It might not.
But it just might.
She started as always with slowing her breathing and calming her mind. From there, she turned her focus inwards, tapping into the source of her powers, whatever that might be. Her room came into its usual focus, all dull colors to her inner eye: nothing for her powers to latch on to. She ignored it, ignored her usual practice of testing the range of her control, and turned her powers towards herself.
Could she do it?
It’s just another type of rock, she told herself. You taught yourself how to manipulate those. It’s just another type of rock, one that you have to focus on slightly differently.
Her body came into the strange focus of her powers. She could feel the matrix that made up her bones, see it glow dully to her inner eye.
Fuck.
It wouldn’t work.
Yes, there were compounds similar to rocks in human bones, but she had forgotten a little anatomy fact. Bones aren’t solid. They’re mostly fucking hollow. They’re filled with all sorts of lovely things like bone marrow, with barely enough minerals there for her powers to even sense, let alone control.
The only bones that she might be able to pull from would be big ones: femurs, humeruses, scapulae, sternum, pelvis. None of those were exactly something she could afford to fuck around with! She had been hoping she could maybe sacrifice a pinky to the cause, and get out of here with 9 fingers and her freedom. If she messed with those bones, she would likely cripple herself! She needed to be able to get out after using the material to pick the lock on her door. That wasn’t an option.
There… was something else, though.
Teeth.
She hadn’t even considered the fucking teeth. It made sense though; they were primarily a calcium compound, if she remembered correctly. That was pretty close to limestone, which was easy enough to work with.
32 escape options, right in her mouth.
She had to think about this.
Lyn was honest enough with herself to admit that it occurred to her to use other people for this. The guards came by twice a day with food; that was plenty close enough to use her powers. The deciding factor in her internal debate wasn’t whether or not it was morally acceptable, but rather that pulling teeth from other people would be extremely noticeable. It would get her escape attempt stopped before she even started. It was an uncomfortable realization that if she could have gotten away with it, she would have been willing to do it.
Once she got out, Lyn was going to need so much therapy.
Have to get out first, though.
It took her a few days to get enough courage to even test the theory. She started by just feeling around; nothing drastic, just trying to see if it would even work. It wasn’t any more force than she could generate by poking at them with her tongue.
And it worked.
That was one part of a plan down. Now, she just had to figure out the rest.
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The door on her cell locked with a techno-mechanical monstrosity of a lock. It seemed to read something from the key, maybe an RFID, and check that it had the correct whatever-it-was before allowing the key to turn and open her cell. She wouldn’t be able to do anything with that.
The actual locking mechanism, though, was a deadbolt. That, she could work with. If she had enough material, she could shear through the deadbolt, and the door would swing freely.
The problem after that, though, was getting out of the building. She turned the problem over in her head for a while before coming to a solution.
Corporation had built her a nice, solid cell in one of their buildings. The surrounding areas were cleared of anything she could use her powers on. But fundamentally, this building wasn’t a prison—it was an office building. There were no safeguards against escape outside of the one little wing she was kept in. If she managed to get out of that section, she could get to a fire escape route and just walk right out.
This was all assuming she didn’t get caught while she was still inside the building. This escape wouldn’t be stealthy; she wasn’t a mimic, and there were cameras everywhere. But if she timed it right, she could maybe steal a lab coat or something to disguise the fact that she didn’t belong there. It might buy her enough time to get out of the building and at least partially out of the city before they realized just where she had gone.
She had the pieces in place. She had a plan, as flimsy as it might be.
Now she just… had to get her materials.
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Pulling teeth was a classic torture move.
And Lynnura was going to do it to herself.
More than that—she had to do it while making it seem like everything was fine, because she had no privacy. She planned to do it during her meditation, then do some sleight-of-hand to get the tooth out of her mouth and into her pillowcase, where she would be able to hide it as she practiced with the new material. But for it to work, she had to keep from showing any signs that she was in pain.
She wished she could pull this off without needing to pull the whole tooth. But in the long run, it would be better to pull the tooth entirely than mess with the enamel composition, especially as she didn’t have any practice with the material yet.
There was nothing for it. She knew what she had to do, now she just… needed to do it.
She started her meditation as always, then turned her attention to her mouth. It couldn’t be any of the front teeth, their absence would be too noticeable. So she would have to go for the hardest teeth to pull: the molars.
She examined the tooth with her powers, taking in just how it sat in her gums, the four roots that extended deep into her jawbone. She surrounded it with her power—and pulled.
If she had to pick the worst part, Lyn would say it was the sound. The crack as her jawbone finally gave up its hold on the roots of the tooth was impossibly loud in her ears, and she had to work to keep her face blank. It hurt, of course; she had expected it, but it still managed to catch her off guard with its intensity. The crack was accompanied by a bloom of pain that radiated through her entire cheek, making her bones ache with it. The tooth fell onto her tongue, and she pushed it to the bottom of her mouth before she could accidentally swallow it along with the surge of blood that was coming from the wound.
She took a slow, deep breath in through her nose, ignoring her frantic desire to pant from the pain and exertion. She had done it. She finally had something to use for her powers.
With any luck, she’d only need the one to get out of there.
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She needed three.
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After far too long of hiding her experimentation and pain, Lynnura was finally ready to make a break for it. She had spent the last few days steadily working through the thick metal of the deadbolt, and today she got through the last of it.
The door was unlocked.
She took a deep breath—
And pushed it open.
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