HER SCREAMS FILLED THE COLD, WHITE ROOM. They echoed off every surface possible, hoarse and horrific. They spoke of a woman, bloody and broken, in so much pain she could not help but be consumed by it. Someone ripped and torn, left to die like a wounded animal in a forest of cold grey stone.
Her hands, unbound in a pitying rarity, scrabbled for something to hold so they wouldn't drown in the pain. Her fingernails had already been worn to the bone yet they still scratched at the iron bedrails around her. Blood dripped from shallow silver cuts in the metal, making her fingers slip and stumble as they tried to just hold on.
The pain seemed unimaginable. It shook through the skin-and-bone woman like a demon seeking for escape, and it offered no mercy as it tore her insides apart. She looked like she could barely manage to suck in a breath, heaving shallow gasps of precious oxygen when the torment relented, only to rear her head and choke once more when the demon resumed.
She looked like she could be pretty, in a better state. But there was nothing beautiful about the writhing form, pale and drenched in red. It was as though a painter had squeezed its misery onto a canvas and just left it, squirming and still half-alive, for unamused men in grey to observe. Strands of sweat-drenched hair clung to her temples, and beads of moisture dripped down her pallid skin, accumulating with the blood and shed tears, smearing messily as she thrashed.
Only her feet were shackled. To be expected, really. A creature in total misery was always so quick to abandon logic at a chance at freedom, and no one could say this pain-ridden being wouldn't try for the door, even with her body splitting apart.
She had an audience, of course. Men and a few scattered women, all in matching grey coats, watched the woman suffer. Some looked bored; others barely veiled their disgust for the scene; some looked a little happy at the scene. A few didn't look bothered at all, eyes glazed over like they weren't really seeing the sight before them. Hearing the howls of a girl, barely a woman, dying on the cot before them.
It took seven hours for the baby to be born. Hours of misery, of begs for death, of desperate, pitiful attempts to silence her own voice with her clammy hands around her throat. Night had fallen, unbeknownst outside the compound's walls, and only some remained to watched the pathetic figure finally grasp some sense of relief.
As the pain left the woman, she finally breathed slower, though still with heaving chest and wide, tearful eyes. She pressed idly down and stared at what her hand brought her back; more blood. It dripped to join its smeared brethren on her thin slip, and she let it be. Her head tipped back, and her eyes shut. Perhaps she thought that peace could finally come. Perhaps she only hoped it could ever be so.
No one bothered to help her. No one even touched her, or offered a cloth to wipe all the swirling red from her thighs and cheeks. It did not seem like she expected them to.
It was only as the screams of a baby finally pierced her ears, that she moved. Her eyes sprung back open wide and she flung herself up, claws scrabbling at the railing for a lifeline as she tried to grasp reality. She watched, half-conscious and delirious, as the same smattering of clean grey coats passed around a screaming child. It was the only colour amongst the wave of monochrome, pink and crying and still bloody and alive.
The woman heaved herself into a sitting position, forcing her drenched limbs to weave through the whirlpool she was barely surviving. Desperation once more filled her face and she spoke, crying out for the baby in the doctor's arms. Her throat rasped in pain; she still went on, trying to earn their attention. Trying anything, even if she could barely manage above a whisper.
They ignored her. Or maybe they didn't even notice.
She tried to get up, but the chains that bound her feet held her down. Tears streaked gently down her cheeks, glowing in the harsh hospital lighting. Pleas scratched from her throat like sandpaper. Begging for them to just let her hold the baby, touch her child, kiss its grubby hands and promise it a future she knew it would never have. She would do anything, she cried, to just have one moment with the tiny child. Could she even give it a name?
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Little Spy | Peter Parker ✓
Fanfiction❛ A BLACK WIDOW DOES NOT FAIL. ❜ | How does one find a balance between finding yourself and being who everyone wants you to be at the same time? Freya Knight, one of the infamous girls from the Red Room, was about to figure that out. UNEDITED/VERY O...
