These Little Games We Play (I suspect you're cheating)

In Which The Washing Machine Breaks

Buttons likes to think of herself as an inquisitive person. She is. Her curiosity knows no bounds. Technology especially captures her interest, and she's already figured out the microwave, and the oven, and the AC.

But not the washing machine.

So, naturally, she opens the top and climbs in, manoeuvring her limbs into a comfortable position to rest in a way that most limbs don't bend. The lid shuts, and she relaxes in the darkness for a while, closing her eyes and grinning her omnipresent grin. There are a small amount of clothes in here with her, but it's a big machine, and that's all she could really ask for.

Roughly ten minutes later, Castle's familiar, slightly-limping, heavy tread traipses into the utility room. Buttons' only warning is a series of sharp beeps, before jets of painfully hot water soak her body.

She yelps, in shock more than pain, and immediately chokes on the steady stream of hot water rushing down her throat.

Frantically, she sets on disentangling her limbs and escaping, but she can't quite remember which way is up, her initial fright disorienting her in the darkness. Panic begins to set in for real, and she begins feeling for any sort of latch or indication that the wall she's fighting against could be the lid. The machine makes a horrible groaning sound as it attempts to rotate, her body jamming it. The water level rises again, cutting her oxygen supply in half.

Eventually, she manages to find what she assumes is the lid (she has to be right, she has to be), and presses against it -- just as the machine stops groaning and starts growling as it rotates sharply, juddering to a painful stop.

She can't hear the cracking noise that her outstretched arm makes as it snaps in two places over the hot, hot water rushing around in her ears.

The blinding pain of having her arm cracked and torn causes her to shriek, but again, more water -- mixed with soap and ink this time, she tries her hardest not to swallow it -- forces itself into her mouth, quickly trickling into her lungs as if her scream of agony was an offer for shelter in a thunderstorm.

Buttons begins to thrash as the dreadful machine jolts in a circle once again, this time managing to turn her so that her head is trapped beneath the water, her legs are caught up with her broken, bleeding arm and her neck is put under an extreme amount of stress. Tears leak from her stinging eyes, but she pays no mind, focusing more on escape escape get me out of here fuck

The washing machine jolts, not quite managing to move, and her broken arm is pulled on viciously, sending another cloud of caustic ink into the horrid mess of hot water and soap and her own blood.

Unable to hold her breath any longer, her body forces her to inhale sharply, only succeeding in flooding her lungs with the water, causing her to cough violently, head still underwater. The machine tumbles once more, and it jerks her weakening body so roughly that she bites the tip of her tongue clean off, spitting the no-longer-attached flesh out into the mixture of liquids she's inhaling. There is no longer any space above the water -- she bleeds freely into it, her eyes made painfully raw.

It's pitch black. Somehow, that makes drowning so much worse.

With a final heave for oxygen resulting in nothing but pain and terror, her mind blurs and she feels her heartbeat go slow.

-

Castle sits on the washing machine's lid, humming to herself as it works to overpower the constant clunking noises it makes every time. It's an old beast, and she had been meaning to get a new one, but never got around to it.

However, it does sound particularly bad today. It's rattling and groaning more than it usually does, and she's felt weird jolts on the lid, like it was being hit.

She hops off, and lands with a slight splash directly into a puddle of watered-down black ink, seeping out from the bottom of the machine.

Hands shaking and breath coming in quick little gasps, she pops the lid.

Please don't be angry, please don't be angry...

It turns out Castle won't have to be afraid of Buttons' wrath for the next few hours. Inside the machine is the twisted, soaked corpse of one of the monsters she shares a house with.

Stomach convulsing from the overpowering smell of uncapped markers and detergent, Castle vomits onto the tiled floor, the image of a torn-apart arm and the sheared-off tongue burrowing into her mind like maggots.

I'll never be able to get the ink out of those clothes, she thinks, as she heaves.