Huge thanks for the kind comments, everyone. This became a series because of you. - Jekyll.
----
The bed they give her is a simple, military-grade cot with a thin mattress, plain, white sheets and a pillow that's got the texture of something freshly synthesised and almost... living. It was clearly generated by someone that doesn't use a human bed, but it could be an ebony four-poster compared to sleeping on the floor, and she doesn't utter a single word of complaint against it.
She divides her days when Alex doesn't visit her quite simply: studying every inch of her cell as covertly as she can to locate cameras, mechanisms, anything she can work with or try to sabotage, and... slinking, maddeningly unsuccessful, back into that bed. They've learnt their lessons from the previous times they captured her, clearly - that should have been obvious as soon as they stripped her, refusing to let her even have a hairpin in case she managed to force a particular exposed circuit and cause a fire...
Good memories.
The only way out she has is Alex. She's been here two weeks now, seen him twice, and considered him near-constantly to reach that conclusion: he's the only novel thing in this whole stupid set-up - if not for Alex's 'companionship', she might as well be hermetically sealed in here, her other captors refusing to set foot near her after the initial violence. Even her food is delivered through an automated slot that, when she stuck her arm through it on day two, was revealed to be double-sealed away from the outer corridor and useless for escape, just like the tiny adjoining chamber she uses for the toilet.
But they send her a whole
person
every few days, and people are the biggest liability in any system. Even if those people are like Alex. Quiet, confident Alex, with his smiles, his heat, and his well-selected words.
All weaponised
, she reminds herself.
Weaponised
against
her.
He arrives again on the fourteenth day of her imprisonment. Three days since the straps and that damn vibrator made themselves
very
familiar with her body.
When he arrives, his hair is wet, and he isn't wearing any socks nor boots. She stares at him from her small nest of bedding like he's grown a second head, or maybe a third bare foot. In his hand is a grey towel, and he's drying the back of his (only) head even as he throws her a smile - even as he stands in the cell doorway, half in and half out, and extends his free hand towards her like they're about to go for a drive, or maybe to the beach.
"I've had an excellent idea," he says, and the sound of any voice after three days, let alone his, warm and noticeably affectionate, is enough to make her pulse quicken. "Come with me."
She learns nothing of the facility's layout as she pads, bewildered and still naked, down the corridor outside her cell. The panelling is seamless, floor to ceiling, with only simple light strips to illuminate the way. She thinks about knocking Alex out and making a run for it three separate times - but that's all she can do as she follows him, holding his hand like a lost child, along corridor after nondescript corridor:
think
about it. The cumulative effect of the drug is infuriating.
When they arrive at the final turn in their little walk, she stops short. The metal door has hummed open, and what she sees makes her insides twist with surprise, immediate recognition, and then a lot of confusion.
"I'm getting a shower?"
Then she clenches her jaw and has to almost physically block out the flash of helpful suggestions her mind offers up for what Alex-plus-shower might mean - all of them involve her hands against the glass divider that separates the shower area from the rest of the room, her captor's hair falling just like it is now, dark over his brow, and a quick, generous rhythm snapping through his hips -
fuck
.
"It seems the most humane thing to do," Alex says, and she blinks away the thought quickly.
"Since when were your kind worried about being humane?" she quips back.
As she steps inside and approaches the shower at the end of the room she takes quick stock of it: the panels in this room are white instead of the unforgiving slate grey of her cell, and the glass divider is a single sheet that allows the user just to just walk around it and under the shower head.
"Since you've deigned to stay with us for longer than a few days?" Alex replies warmly.
There don't seem to be any cameras, but then again, she only has Alex's word to tell her that there are cameras in her
cell
and she still believes him - their technology is maddeningly hard to spot nowadays.
Then someone suddenly appears to her left, and she jolts - then calms. It's a mirror, hanging on the lefthand wall over a shelf-like counter. The thin, startled woman staring back at her looks as though she hasn't slept in weeks - she's more muscle than fat, but even the muscle is beginning to turn ropey and give her a street-urchin's hardness. Her hair is lank, her lips almost bruised, and the man standing beside her in his military issue shirt and slacks is so achingly
healthy
and
handsome
and
smiling
at whatever he sees on her face that she has to look away again, fast - it's an uncomfortable cocktail of shame and annoyance.
"Are you going to join me?" she says, spotting the bottles of what must be soap at the base of the shower, by the drainage system. "Or are you just here to make me realise how filthy I look by comparison?"
Out the corner of her eye, Alex folds the towel that had still been in his hands and stows it under the sink, where a chute opens obligingly to his touch. "I've just finished. Hence no shoes."
And the wet hair, annoyingly and effortlessly tousled.
Then he turns, and she can only watch as he lifts himself up onto the counter to sit. He leans back against the mirror, clasping his hands in his lap like he's waiting for his laundry to finish on any other weekend.
"I'm just here to make sure none of my colleagues disturb you," he says.
