Night's Omen

Prompt List

• Wanted
• Test
• Kingdom
• Sorry
• Pain
• Order
• Silence
• Insanity
• Storm
• Fae

He had lost count of the days, but he knew that time was distorted when you were isolated, and so he allowed himself the luxury of hope - hope that time was not passing as quickly outside as it was inside - because to Antoine, he honestly could not say whether he had been a prisoner for a day or a year. Unfortunately, hope was no replacement for pain, and the idea of an extraction from the high walls of Midnight became more and more dim as the undefined time ticked by.

It was somewhere around a week in when the torture really began. He was simply locked in a white room at first, which sucked an immense amount of ass, but wasn't necessarily wearing on him like it did most people. He knew what it was, what it was designed to do, and as long as he tried to keep that in mind, he felt like he could hold out long enough for someone to bargain his release. The good thing about working for the guilds was that when you surpassed a certain level of training, there were... advanced methods... of study. Since he was a Level 6 (a trainer, which was only a step below the head of a guild), he had gone through the ugly SERE-like prep.

So, while being stuck in a white room, wearing only white clothing, being fed white rice on a white paper plate, and having to use the bathroom by shoving a piece of white paper beneath the door to signal someone was the most mind-numbing experience he had ever had, it wasn't quite breaking him like he thought they meant for it to.

Of course, the white room was just the beginning.

One day, while doing pushups and trying to mentally steel himself for the inevitable interrogation, he felt something wet hit the back of his shirt. That only lasted for about a second, until the "wet" ate through his shirt and began on the flesh of his back. It felt like someone had jammed him with a hot poker, and he immediately dropped onto his chest, the pain so sharp he couldn't even cry out. Instead, he sat up and pulled off the shirt, throwing it across the room as though it had burned him (which it had, clearly). The more the spot on his back boiled, the more he struggled not to scream, trying to rationalize what had just happened. Then it happened again, this time hitting him on the now-exposed arm. Then he did scream, because now? Now he could see what was going on, and he realized that he wasn't in a fucking white room at all.

He'd read once that Saddam Hussein had locked people in rooms that dropped acid from the ceiling every hour on the hour, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. He'd read much worse things, actually, and when he himself had been deployed, he'd seen some pretty bad cases of what was defined as "surviving" the terror that their torture chambers could provide. But even with all of the things he'd done, things he'd witnessed and things he'd experienced and trained for... nothing had prepared him for that sledgehammer of reality that had just hit him square in the teeth: surviving this was going to be a lot more than just sitting in a boring room by himself.

The acid room was just the beginning. He didn't sleep for a few days after the drops started, always darting around the room trying to avoid them. On day three, when he was good and sleep deprived, they decided to bring him into an actual room for questioning. The hall outside of the white room was almost blinding in contrast; his eyes watered almost all the way to wherever they were leading him, shocked with the sudden darkness that surrounded him mingled in with flashes of colour here or there. It was probably intended that way, to be honest; he couldn't find his way around this place if he couldn't see where he was going, right? Truth be told, he tried to count his steps as they walked/dragged him along, but in his burned out mind, it was hard, and he kept losing count.

When they began strapping him down into a chair, he tried to fight back, but one of the handlers stuck a finger right into a fresh burn hole in his leg, and the momentary burst of pain caused him to concentrate on that rather then what they were doing. They left the room as quickly as they'd come in, and for a few moments, he just sat there heaving and salivating and shaking from the acid burns on his body. He didn't even realize he was not alone in the room until something moved - something that turned out to be Rajz.

"It must be pretty bad if you're here," he grunted.

The vampire who was the current master of Midnight EU, where they lacked the tense truce between the guilds that the US had, did not smile, because he wasn't happy about the situation, and frankly he found the idea of a spy within his walls enraging, not amusing. Whatever Niall had done with the two hunters he'd caught inside his house was his business, but despite his fearsome reputation, Rajz could not fathom how he did not inflict more damage, and he said as much as he began to walk slowly towards his prey.

"I'm not sure how you thought this situation would go down; or rather, how your guild leader told you it would. Let me make one thing abundantly clear to you, Mister Sutherland," he said, pausing for effect to allow that he knew Antoine's real name sink in, "I am not Niall, and this is not going to end with you simply 'returning home' and some trivial little back and forth breaking out between the guilds and my household until Diamond steps in and forces a truce. What is going to happen," he informed him (and now he smiled, turning his back briefly to pick up something on the counter behind him), "is that I am going to dig, and dig, and dig into that brain of yours. All of your training, all of your mental shielding, none of it will make a difference."

Rajz got close to Antoine's face for a moment, and across his calm visage suddenly the face of a demon flickered - was it sleep deprivation or madness creeping in, or was the vampire inside his head already?  He began to speak, and though his voice was slow and deliberate, every word was pronounced with just enough emphasis to denote how angry he was; as he continued, his voice grew louder. "I am going to peel your psyche back layer by layer like a fucking onion until you beg me to kill you, and then, if you're very lucky, I might just do that. But not before I have the lovely Lily brutalized by the ferals kept in our basement, and certainly not before your son James and your daughter Nora know what it truly is to fear, to feel pain, and to bleed. Now, Mister Sutherland, do us a favour and say 'Ahh'," he concluded, his voice thick with rage. He reached out and pressed his thumb and forefinger against either side of Antoine's jaw, applying enough pressure to force it open without breaking it (mere ounces of pressure from the vampire, any more and he could have literally shattered Antoine's lower jaw in his hand), and tipped something forward.

The scent of bleach filled the room, and Antoine's screams were drowned out by violent gurgling noises.

It was actually only day five.