Saori

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On the first day, I’m jolted awake out of a sound sleep. Literally jolted; they shove something like a cattle prod against my neck, and I wake up screaming in pain. I don’t immediately remember where I am or how I got there. I’m confused and everything feels very sludgy somehow, like it’s hard to even think.

Before I can adjust to anything at all, the instant I open my eyes, someone sprays what feels like pepper juice into them. It feels like my eyes are on fire, and the vision I hadn’t even begun to sort through is immediately obscured by tears. I scream again, and then again when the first lash lands on my back a few seconds later.

Someone grabs my hands, pulling them out to either side. I struggle, something that didn’t even occur to me until they grabbed me, but I’m weak and clumsy, and they have no difficulty pinning me like this. I feel very exposed, even before the cattle prod returns and starts on my breasts. That hurts so much that I can’t even scream, even before someone grabs my hair and then hits me in the face. He yells at me and I can sort of understand that he’s telling me to look at him.

I’m so scared, and his voice makes me even more so. It feels like a really bad idea to argue, so I open my eyes and eventually manage to focus through the tears enough to see the man talking. He leers at me with a grin and an awful sort of intensity in his eyes.

I barely understand what he’s saying. Something about this being a message to make sure that I understand exactly where things stand between us. It makes no sense. It’s hard to even think.

It gets harder a few seconds later, when the man releases me, and before I can even think about whether this is a good thing, I’m getting shocked again. It goes on longer, this time, ninety seconds of continuous pain. As that’s still going on, there’s a feeling of something metal on my hand, and then they crush one of my fingers in some kind of metal press. Bone shatters within thirty seconds. They don’t stop, keep increasing the pressure, forcing shards of my own broken finger bones through the flesh around them.

I scream again, though it’s strangled by pain, and then a moment later by the hand around my neck. They choke me until my vision, the little I have through the tears, starts to go grey, and I hope that this is it, that I’m going to die now.

I don’t. They release me, but then come the needles, starting with my hands. They’re coated in something that burns, a lot like the stuff that they sprayed in my eyes. Then they go back to shocking me, and then—

—I wake up. I tremble, keeping it as tightly controlled as possible. I wonder whether this will ever end, and I kind of doubt it. I wonder whether I’d be better off killing myself if that’s what it takes to make it stop, not for the first time or the hundredth time or quite possibly even the hundred thousandth time.

The first hundred times, I’m pretty sure, the answer would have been a solid “fuck yes.” But by the time I had any actual chance of killing myself, I’d stopped…really feeling like I deserved to escape. It was worse in the immediate aftermath, for the first few years; back then the nightmares happened almost every time I slept.

Eventually I work my way up to opening my eyes and looking around. I already know where I am, because figuring that out first has been a habit for a very long time at this point. But so has looking around like I’m puzzled about it, because generally seeming like an idiot has been to my advantage in life, particularly on the occasions I’m not actually being one.

Kyoko knows, of course. I’m not sure she’s ever commented on it; she’s not the type, especially with me. But I’m not blind, and I’d have to be to have missed that she’s never once fallen for this act. She just strokes my fur, and smiles sadly at me. From the pain in her eyes, I’m not entirely sure which of us just had the worse nightmare, and that’s just fucking depressing, all things considered.

She doesn’t say anything. She probably can’t; Kyoko tends to get like that after her nightmares, and it can take a while before she figures out how to talk properly after a bad one. But she strokes my fur for a few minutes in comfortable silence, and it feels more like communication than I normally get with anyone.

And then I stretch, and then shift into skin, and we get up to start another day in paradise.

---

On the second day, I don’t really wake up, not as such. I wasn’t asleep. It has been over twenty-four hours of continuous torture, and the torturers were hardly going to give me a break to rest. But I fell into a thick haze while they cut into my back with an obsidian scalpel, one hundred and nineteen times. It takes them a while, and that’s the closest thing I’ve had to rest since they started.

I’m jolted out of it when they pour something onto my back that itches, and where it gets into the wounds it burns, all of the lines cut into my back suddenly exploding with pain. I scream and try to thrash, but my body doesn’t respond to my commands very well, too fucked up by all the injuries it’s sustained.

Someone laughs at my flopping, then kicks me over onto my back, sending another wave of pain through me as it brings the cuts into contact with a floor crusted with salt. They have a knife at my throat, and for a moment I have a sort of wild, burning hope that this is over.

Nope. He just holds me like that for a few moments, staring into my eyes, and then pulls the knife up and to the side. It cuts me, but not anywhere near deep enough to kill me. Then he hits me in the face with the pommel several times.

It’s at this point that the rape starts. It’s a new sort of pain, one I’ve never felt before, coupled with a deep sense of violation. He’s much bigger than I am, and he’s brutal about it, leaving me with bruises. At some point he grabs my hand, the one that’s already had all the fingers crushed, and squeezes them together hard enough it would have hurt even if they hadn’t been. I try to scream, but he’s choking me at the same time, and all that gets past is a strangled whimper. Distantly, I can hear other people laughing, and on some quiet, distant level, I feel both ashamed to be seen like this, and terrified because I know they’re just waiting for their turns with me next.

It doesn’t take long for the first to finish, and then—

—I wake up. I suppress a shudder, and suppress the nausea that comes with it.

This was a bad one. I think nightmares about the second day might be the worst, in general, but even by those standards this was a bad one. Bad enough to wake me early, and for once I’m awake before Kyoko is, something rare enough to feel almost like a treat.

It’s not worth it. It’s not even vaguely close to worth it if you squint from just the right angle. But it beats the hell out of most times I’ve woken up from that particular nightmare, and if I’m going to have the dream anyway, I’ll cling to what comfort I can find in the aftermath.

Which is, itself, something I learned from Kyoko, now that I think about it. I think I might actually feel grateful, and feeling grateful about something is another thing rare enough for me to resemble a treat.

I curl up on her, trying and failing to suppress the mental voice telling me to run from her, and wait for her to wake up.

---

The third day is the mildest. Not saying much, admittedly; it still opens with me getting pepper sprayed, whipped, and branded with a hot iron. It still gets worse from there. But by the third day, I’m starting to feel distant from myself, fading in and out of lucidity. I have not slept since this nightmare started, and haven’t eaten either, and I’m starting to feel delirious just from that.

My mind is fraying badly, by the third day, and it feels like a mercy. This feeling becomes even more acute when they start raping me again, in more invasive and humiliating ways than yesterday. I still feel sick and ashamed, still feel a sort of horror about what’s being done to me, still feel violated in deep ways. But I’m also getting gang raped in front of an audience, pissed on, degraded, and forced to feel a strange, uncomfortable sort of pleasure in the whole thing.

I don’t want to be lucidly aware of what’s happening and what it means. That distance is enough to make the third day the mildest. It’s still awful, and eventually they break out the needles again, and—

—I wake up. I tremble, unable to entirely suppress it this time. It’s not obvious, though, probably not even to Kyoko. Fur tends to hide that kind of minute trembling.

I sleep in fur more often than not. I tell myself it’s because it’s more comfortable, or better for cuddling, or just that it’s logistically simpler when I’m sharing a bed with, sometimes, a whole crowd. Like most of the better lies I tell, all of these are absolutely true, and they do matter. The idea of only getting to cuddle in skin is upsetting to think too hard about.

But a lie by omission is still a lie, and I know damn well that I started sleeping in fur because I’m never a fox in my nightmares. Waking up as one makes it easier to convince myself that it’s not real.

Those dreams are clearer and more consistent in my mind than any of my actual memories. I’ll take all the help in thinking they aren’t real that I can get, thanks.

Kyoko is already awake, as usual, and she’s stroking my fur gently. Capi’s awake, too, as usual, though it’s a bit unusual she’s still in bed. Capi sleeps less in a week than I do in a night and gets by just fine. Cuddling is great, but I can’t really blame her for not lying there awake every night with nothing to do.

But she’s there this morning, and crooning softly to me, something that would strike me as almost intolerably patronizing from most people. Not so much from Capinera, though. Singing is just…what she is, on a fundamental level. When she croons a lullaby, it doesn’t register as out of place enough to seem like anything other than comfort.

I hate that it would be just…so much easier for me to handle, if it were patronizing. As it is, I’m barely able to keep myself in the same room, and I need a solid ten minutes before I change into skin, because it might be hard to keep from crying, otherwise.

---

The fourth day is bad again. If the worst nightmares aren’t of the second day, they’re of the fourth, hands down.

It would be…misleading, to say that it’s when they start mutilating me. They’ve been doing that for quite some time. My hands are little more than sacks of bone fragments starting to fester, by this point. Mutilation is a bit of an understatement.

But all the same, for the first three days, they had a certain reserve. They mangled me but wanted me sort of intact. The fourth day is when they stop caring about that entirely. It opens with getting one of my feet smashed with a hammer, then they cut off my lips and cheeks. Teeth are removed slowly, one at a time, while being verbally degraded and occasionally burned. My tongue gets cut repeatedly before they tear it out by brute force, then cauterize the wound so I don’t drown in my own blood. Nose, similarly, is first broken, then removed entirely. Then my ears are torn off.

They make sure I get the chance to see just how hideous the resulting visage is. They tell me all about it, show me different views in the mirror. Then they rape me, laughing at the noises I make with most of my face and mouth missing. Then, finally, they reach for my eyes and—

—I wake up. I shudder, then force myself into stillness and a slow, languid stretch. It feels so fake, so hollow.

It also feels very unfair, in this moment. I still remember all of it so clearly. Right down to the order they took the teeth out in, and I’d be thrilled not to have ever even thought about that one.

At least I woke up before they did the eyes, I guess. That, more than anything else, is what fucks with me about nightmares of the fourth day. Blindness is…existentially upsetting to think too hard about, even if it hadn’t involved so much pain and horror.

I’m alone this morning. Got a little stir-crazy last night, or at least that’s what I’d call it if anyone asked. In reality, it was mostly because Kyoko’s new manor is starting to feel like a home.

People like me don’t have homes. People like me don’t deserve them. I fled the house when it started to feel too much like one, last night. Went for a long drive trying to clear my head, struggling to remember that I don’t really want to just keep driving away and never think about these people again.

It would be easier, if I did that. I could go right back to the life I had Before, where things made sense, and people did too. It could even be the same people, because I’m sure Shadowed Flame would welcome me back with open arms. It’s not like I left fully anyway. It’s not like anyone ever does.

It would be easy. It would be simple. Things might make sense again.

I hated myself, Before. I had nothing to live for. I had nobody, not a single fucking person, who cared what happened to me.

It would be simpler going back to that. It would be free. It takes five hours for me to shake off the nightmare, convince myself it’s not worth it, and go back to the manor, adamantly refusing to call it home in the process.

I don’t explain where I was. They don’t ask me to.

---

The fifth day is a brutal slog. I was distant from myself by the second day, but once I’m blind and basically incapable of movement, that goes into overdrive. I feel barely connected to my own body, and I’m glad. Pain is all it’s ever going to give me again, and I’m tired of hurting like this. I feel numb, when they start beating me again, just waiting for it to be over.

My limbs were already useless, all four broken beyond repair. Standing up is never going to be possible for me again. There’s not even enough intact bone and muscle to thrash when it hurts.

But the fifth morning is when they start amputating things entirely. First arms, then legs, each one removed slowly and painfully, then cauterized so I won’t bleed out. The pain, and the feeling of visceral wrongness as they pull the joints apart, is enough to shock me back into clear awareness.

Not for long, though. Not for long. They’ve been taking enormous pains to keep me alive through all this, but there are limits, and I’m finally slipping across the last of them. Cauterizing the wounds keeps me alive long enough to torment a little longer. I get raped again, though my body is so broken by now that it doesn’t feel like sex, just pain.

But after that, things are damaged enough that I finally take one last, shallow breath, let it out as a whimper, and—

—wake up. Somehow, I wake up again, just like always. I feel sick to my stomach and it’s hard to think clearly. I’m in fur, but even if I weren’t, I wouldn’t be able to talk. This one was bad enough to leave me nonverbal, the way Kyoko’s nightmares often affect her.

Funny. They don’t usually go quite that far. Normally it cuts off a little bit before the moment of death. I think it might be better with it, honestly. After living out five days of hell, being tortured in such spectacularly cruel ways, the idea that it has an ending is a comfort.

So is Kyoko, stroking the fur of my throat. It’s softer than the rest of my fur, and it feels good. I don’t think there’s anyone else I would let touch me quite like this, though. It feels too vulnerable, too exposed.

Some part of me wants to run. Another part of me is already wondering how long it will be until this all plays out again, reliving the same five days in my nightmares over and over and over and over, forever. Some part of me wants to go back to life Before, when nobody tried to tell me I don’t deserve this, like I don’t know damn well what I did.

It’s not a great life I’m waking up to. I know that. But my life After has nice things in it, and after twenty minutes of Kyoko gently stroking my fur, this feels real enough that I manage to make myself get up and face it.

Just another day in paradise.
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