Disclaimer: None of it’s mine, except for… nah, none of it’s mine.
Warnings: Omg this is sooooooo dark! They even kill a 13-year-old! Damn that OZ! Torture, violence, language… offhand I’d rate this R but you decide. It takes place after Duo escapes from the moon base, Hilde is being held on charges of treason.
*~*~*
She blinked against the harsh overhead lights. What would it be today? No matter what, she would tell them nothing. Even if she’d known something to tell she would’ve remained silent. It wasn’t worth the effort it took to say anything anymore.
Simply because she betrayed them didn’t mean she was what they thought she was. She was not a spy, a traitor, a piece of dirt to be disposed of. She was a sixteen-year-old girl, and she had made a mistake. She had made the mistake of giving her loyalty to the wrong persons, them.
"Up. Out of bed." A voice said. It was the same voice that had tormented her for the past three days, ever since she had been bound over for sentencing. There was little doubt in her mind as to what the sentence would be. Treason was only ever rewarded by execution. She’d known that when she betrayed them, and she hadn’t cared anymore then than she did now.
She obliged the voice, tripping from her bed. Her legs would hardly support her but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing her broken until she really was. Her spirit could take far more punishment than her body, though. She was strong-willed and stubborn, but she was also a child and a weak one at that. Brushing her greasy, matted dark hair out of her eyes, she growled "What’s it to be today, mein Herr?" A slight trickle of blood ran over her lips as she spoke. Uh-oh, that wasn’t a good sign.
"It pains me to see you this way, cadet Schbieker. Why don’t you just tell us?" He replied, his voice condescending. She was a child, a traitor, and a woman, one of the worst possible combinations.
She spat out the blood that tinted her lips, not appreciating the biting copper taste on her tongue. "Ihr Mutter war eine Hure." She hissed, not daring to say the words in a language he would understand. She knew that if he heard them things would only go worse for her. "I will tell you nothing, you bastard."
"Have it your way." He said with a shrug, and the two guards in the doorway behind him entered, grabbing her by her bruised and bleeding forearms to pull her from the room. She gritted her teeth against the pain. The first day she had held back, fighting with all her severely limited strength to stay in the room. Now her energy was devoted to not screaming, and it was a task that required constant attention. "You’ll break today, cadet. I can practically taste your fear."
He was a lech. Hilde knew that even before she had the proof. He would try unsuccessfully to rape her mind through the pain, and then he would rape her body, which proved all that much easier and seemed to satisfy his bruised ego. Honestly, the first bothered her more. Her body could heal. It would be much more difficult for her mind to do the same. But having him touch her in places that she’d never been touched was not doing well for her mind, either.
The room at the end of the hall. There were people in other cells; they stared in awe as she passed by them. Most people broke after a single trip to the room at the end of the hall. This was her third time, and she still managed to hold her head high as they dragged her mercilessly down the dimly lit corridor. The whispers in the cells between the other prisoners – all female and no more than 17 – were hushing in tones of disbelief.
"She should be dead." One blonde girl breathed.
"I couldn’t stand it. The minute he touched me, I talked." A brunette murmured.
A redhead, no more than thirteen, reached through the bars and brushed Hilde’s hand, catching the elder girl’s attention. "I pray for you every night." She whispered.
At that the steely blue eyes of the girl who had survived two days of torture and was embarking on her third lost some of their hardness. A tear slipped over her cheek. "Don’t pray for me. I’m as good as dead. Pray for yourself." She murmured as she was pulled on down the hall.
*~*~*
The feeling of shackles on her wrists was too familiar now to be properly frightening, they decided, so they attached her to a different toy. There were two or three in the room, not many but plenty for the purposes of juvenile women’s prison. One was quite simply a rack. A prettier one, too be sure, but a rack nonetheless. If your shoulders weren’t ripped from their socket you were lucky. They had tried her on that twice, but both times she had refused to talk or even scream, and they were disheartened. The one they put her in now looked like a polygraph. Only this was different. It didn’t tell you if the user was lying, it simply allowed an electric current to run through them if you didn’t like their answer.
It gave her the shakes.
The fastened straps around her arms at the elbows and the wrists, and around her ankle, calf and thigh. It was the strap around her forehead that bothered her most. It kept her from turning her head even in the slightest to the left or right.
"Now, cadet, we begin a new game." He said. "What is the name of the pilot?"
She had no choice but to meet his eyes, however she did so with defiance. "Go suck a dick." She replied, and before the words were scarcely over her lips a burst of electricity coursed through her. She ground her teeth together, willing herself not to cry out.
"I’ll ask again." He said when the current had subsided. "What is the name of he pilot?"
"Fuck you."
He held up his hand to keep the current from being switched on for a moment. "I like you, cadet. You are not afraid of me." He leaned closer to her, putting his hands on top of hers on the arms of the chair. The touch was more torture to her than anything they had done so far. He was repugnant. Not in looks, he was handsome, or in manner, he was charming. He was repugnant in that he derived pleasure from molesting young girls and torturing children. "You should fear me." He whispered against her ear, following it by running his tongue over her cheek. She shuddered.
"I will bite my tongue off before I tell you anything." She hissed.
His hands abruptly left hers, and the electricity shot threw her again. Only it wasn’t a quick burst this time, they didn’t shut it off. It just kept coming at her, wave after wave, as if it had a life of it’s own. Her teeth clamped down to squelch her screams of pain, and bits of enamel chipped off into her mouth. She was unaware of them.
Her vision finally became clouded with red and heard the distinct sound of her own screaming. Her muscles spasmed but were held down by the straps that cut into her flesh. She longed to stop her screaming, to hide her weakness longer yet, but she seemed to have lost all control over her body. She didn’t notice when they finally turned off the current, the muscles of her face continued to twitch and she felt as if her blood were on fire.
"This will all be over if you tell me his name."
Slowly she regained the lost control over her movements. She choked back another scream, stifling it between gritted teeth as she slid her lips closed. There was a strange metallic taste on her tongue, the taste of a spark like if you lick a battery. Her tongue darted out, vainly trying to moisten her dry lips. When her voice box would finally respond to her commends, she answered him.
"Eat shit and die, bastard."
Again, he held up a hand to keep the electric current turned off. "I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this, cadet. Everyone has his or her weakness. And I know yours." He gave a brief nod to one of the gray-clad guards, who responded with a mimicking nod and left the room. Hilde furrowed her brow, struggling to clear her mind of enough pain to understand what was occurring. Then she heard screaming from the other side of the door. The loud, terrified, incessant screams of a child. The guard reentered…
"I told you everything! I don’t know anything more!"
…pulling behind him the thirteen-year-old redhead. The same girl that had touched Hilde’s hand, told her she prayed for her. She desperately tried to pull her wrist from the tall man’s grasp, but he was far stronger than she was. She screamed and sobbed and begged for mercy, yet the guard’s face remained completely impassive.
"What are you doing?" Hilde asked, unable to fully grasp what was occurring due to the spots of red across her eyes.
"You ignore your own pain." The warden said casually, as if it were to most natural thing in the world, "but perhaps her pain will have some effect on you, ne?" He gave a slight inclination of his head to the guard, a direction to continue.
He balled up a fist and slammed it into the bridge of her nose.
"You fucking cowards! She’s a child! Leave her alone!" Hilde spat as the redhead crumbled to the floor. The guard, not the least but put out, began to kick her in the stomach. The first few kicks were followed by moans, until her muscles lost all power and she crumpled like a rag doll, moving only limply when she was struck.
"You can stop this." The warden said, his voice apathetic but with a twinkle of pleasure in his eyes that made Hilde sick.
"You bastard! You fucking bastard! You goddamn piece of dog shit son of a whore! You were born with your cock in your mother’s ass…" Blood streamed over the girl’s lips and onto the cold concrete floor. "HIS NAME IS DUO MAXWELL!"
The warden held up one hand and the guard stopped. The gray-clad man bent to lift the small girl up, but when he touched her wrist he shrugged and threw it back down across her body.
"She’d dead." He said coolly.
Hilde burst into unintelligible sobs.
*~*~*
She curled up in the shadows behind her bed, her arms wrapped around her knees partially in an attempt to calm the periodic spasm through her shoulder muscle. But mostly it was to hide her tears. She could hardly breath without sobbing. The image of that redheaded girl, blood spilling over her parted lips, eyes wide in death, would haunt her the second she closed her eyes. The girl had been innocent, only a child. Hilde had seen in her eyes the fear as that guard pulled her into the room. Those eyes had begged for salvation.
‘If only I had told sooner… but then I would’ve betrayed Duo!’ She covered her face with her hands. ‘Shimatta! Shimatta!’
"Shimatta!" She cried aloud. "What was I supposed to <u>do</u>?"
"It’s not your fault." A soft voice said from the cell at the other side of the hall. Hilde lifted her tear-stained face and her once fierce, now shattered blue eyes meet tired but clear green ones. Her face, like Hilde’s, was hidden by the shadows of the cell. "No one blames you. Least of all her. People die here everyday."
Hilde wiped away her tears only to have them replaced by more. "I didn’t even know her name." She whispered. The child had died because of her – it may or may not have been her fault, but it was still because of her – and she didn’t even know her name!
"It was Mena. Or so she told me." The green-eyed girl said. "She’s been here… about three months. I think it was her brother they forced her to betray – they used her information to kill him."
Hilde hid her face in her arms, her voice muffled as she spoke again. "I betrayed someone too. And I couldn’t even save her! They broke me!"
The girl inched towards the door, her face finally being illuminated by the hallway lights. Hilde saw with a shock that a jagged white scar that cut from her forehead to her cheek dominated the left side of her face, rendering her eye useless. The scar looked recent – it had yet to fade and bland with her skin. "We’ve all been broken. That’s why they bring us here." She whispered sadly, brushing her fingertips over the scar with a sort of quiet reverence, as if it were a medal. "But broken doesn’t mean that we can never be fixed."
Hilde looked away. Her tears still fell as hard as ever, but the sobs had stopped. Now the tears simply slipped silent and unbidden over her pale, cold cheeks. "Duo…" she whispered without thinking. "I betrayed you… but I had no choice… I thought it would save her…" she leaned her head back against the cinderblock wall, feeling the coolness of it through her hair. Her shoulder muscle spasmed, jerking up and down, but she was getting used to it and ignored the ripples of pain that it caused. "Did I do the right thing, Duo?" she whispered so softly that only she could hear it, and slowly her eyes slid closed into unwilling sleep.
*~*~*
She woke to wide violet eyes and felt a hand over her mouth silence her as she started to scream. "Whoa there kid, no need to freak out." A familiar teasing voice whispered. "Didn’t think I’d let you rot in here, did you? I owe you one, and I’m a guy who always pays his debts."
He removed his hand from her mouth, satisfied that she wouldn’t scream, and began running his nimble fingers over her body, assessing her wounds. "Duo…" she whispered, her eyes wide in disbelief. This had to be a dream, it had to be! Duo was locked up on the moon base, she’d heard about it on TV. But that was before she was convicted, when she still had access to a TV… it was possible and maybe even probable that he had escaped by now.
Her arm muscle spasmed at his touch; she tried to consciously stop it but was unable to. "Who did this to you?" He asked softly, all sound of joking gone from his voice. His eyes were cold and hard, and did not bode well for whomever their silent rage was directed at.
She tried to wrap her arms around her knees again – the position made her feel safe and protected – but her muscled had stiffened while she slept and the very act of moving them took more effort than she could muster. "The warden, that…" ‘bastard’ didn’t even cover what he was. In fact, she didn’t think that there was a word in existence foul enough to describe him. "…that schweine." She murmured.
Duo scooped her easily into his arms. "He’ll get his." He murmured, and it was not just to comfort her. Hilde had the distinct impression that Duo meant he would personally make sure that the warden got what was coming to him.
"I just want to go." She said hoarsely, her voice still raw from crying. She wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her face against his chest. "Please, can we go?"
Duo arms around her became a little tighter, almost protectively. "Yeah, let’s blow this popsicle stand." He said with a hint of his usual good cheer.
As Duo locked the door to her cell, Hilde caught a movement from the cell across. Knowing she shouldn’t speak, but not being able to help it, she whispered to Duo. "The girl in that cell helped me. We have to take her, too."
Duo stared at her for a moment, blinked, and then started to shake his head when a soft voice called out to them. "I can’t leave."
Hilde stared as the green eyes and light blonde hair appeared on the other side of the cell door, the older girl crouched on her bed. She had tears in her eyes, but she was smiling slightly as she looked on the two of them. There was a wistful tilt to her eyes. "We can help you." Hilde whispered.
The girl shook her head. "I deserve to be here. I have betrayed those I loved and I have no family left… what reason have I to live outside this cell?" she whispered. "Please, do not ask me to leave. I do not wish to. This is my retribution and I will bear it. Just go."
Hilde swallowed back fresh tears. "At least tell me your name." She whispered.
The girl stood to her full height and met the other’s eyes. "My name is Midii Une." She said, bowing slightly so that her hair fell over the terrible scar.
"I am Hilde Schbieker." Hilde replied. "Take care of yourself."
The blonde watched them leave, a smile still playing softly across her lips. "May the lord protect them." She whispered as she curled up on the thin mattress of her cot. It was cold but it had been years since she’d been warm. Years and years… ever since she’d left his company it seemed.
"Nanashi…"
~FIN~
Don’t ya luv it? *_- I know you do! I might leave it ambiguous but if you want a sequel write and tell me, if enough people bug me I’ll cave in, I always do!
Quick quick, dictionary:
Ihr Mutter war eine Hure – I <u>hope</u> this means ‘your mother was a whore.’ I’m not great with German.
Shimatta – ‘damn!’ or ‘damn it!’ Japanese.