VAIN | Inside the Universe

Chapter Thirty Two • Amen

"Have you ever had pressure put on your trigeminal nerve?"

My throat was just the tiniest bit dry from the complete lack of water, so it was a little difficult to spit out "only on weekends." To be honest, it took me a minute in itself to realize she had actually spoken.

I swallowed the last bit of moisture I held and managed, "Once." She nodded.

"Scream like it."

My head fell on its own, exhausted, drained, bracing myself for the pain I could already feel. I was dying from the amount of energy I had to put into faking it — every kind of torture we pretended she was inflicting. Anything to convince those above ground that I was being properly broken in.

There was no choice in the matter. I clenched my teeth together and hid the struggle in lifting my head, then I screamed my throat dry once more.

The green, wannabe sadist has been practically mute for days, managing to colonize that little spot against the cave wall with her own brooding thoughts and escape into her own little world, leaving me, quite literally, hanging high and dry. Yet despite not having the luxury of standing with both feet on the ground, I was untouched. She ensured it, letting it be known to all of my gracious friends from before that I was hers. For what reason, God only knows.

You would never expect it, but in this exquisite, five-star, damned underworld of a cell, I only have one complaint. It's of no offense to the chivalrous hosts or the world-renowned torturers who have so artistically decorated the walls with blood splatter. No, it is the blatant absence of the one thing I expected to be here, and that pain upon realization was quick to retreat into the idea that has encompassed a lifetime; The night I knew never came.

It took me much longer than I care to admit until I realized that the light pouring through the grate above me is no sun. Wherever I am, the moon is the only illumination that bathes the sky, nourishing this sick planet with an endless night.

But not mine.

The night I knew would recognize the game of survival. Here, on a planet that calls on the epitomes of darkness to play their most haughty of ways, it would find me and show me yet again how it is the strongest thing I've ever known.

I didn't think I would have to call it.

Though it didn't come when it was time to execute my plan, and now days later, the sky mocks me of my own attraction.

The bounds on my wrists are infused with magic, and although I've gotten much better at deciphering the feeling of it being surrounded by him for what feels like a lifetime, it doesn't feel like his. No, it's much darker. Much for intent and intense. My new skill, for better or worse, had made it awfully clear to me and the green one that the chains are unbreakable to us, laced with the power of the only being who has the authority to release me. Yet, in that case, I don't think release is quite the right word.

I tried, and to my surprise, she tried with me, but I saw that flash of hope leave her eyes much quicker than mine. She didn't say a word, and I suppose I didn't expect her to. With the way her eyes distanced themselves even in the most direct of eyesight, it was explicit that she knew just what would become of me. Though I couldn't help but acknowledge the way she tried to find answers in my eyes. It was an impossible task many before had tried and drowned in, and just like the others, it seemed the dream for her own freedom fled the moment mine did.

Hanging here, littered with scars and a leg broken in more than a few places, I gathered in the lack of further attempts on my life that I'm to be kept alive, just until Thanos comes back from whatever genocidal trip he's on to see me and decide just how many years he would like to watch me wither into death. I feel like I'm in a holding cell anticipating my slaughter, or the waiting room to hell because death is just a bit too busy to greet me at the moment.