this is not a happy story...

This is not a happy story.

In fact, it is quite the opposite.

Those seeking something of a lighter tone should look elsewhere.

In fact, I might highly recommend no one at all reads this story.

For it is not a happy one...

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The darkness surrounded him. He didn't know where he was, or how he got there. The floor felt cool, smooth. Stone?

Where am I? he thought.

Someone lit a brazier and his eyes adjusted to the scene. He was in a cell. Three stone walls -- the fourth a row of imposing iron bars. Someone opened the cell and gave him water. Then they extinguished the brazier.

Darkness. Again.

How long it stretched he could not say. Perhaps hours, perhaps days. When someone came by and lit the brazier again, they had another person with them. Or prisoner? They had a sack over their head at any rate. The "guard" flung the prisoner in the room and snuffed out the brazier.

Seconds stretched into minutes stretched into an uncomfortable period of silence. He was wondering if perhaps this other person was dead, their body unmoving. Yet he could hear their teeth chattering, and finally the rustling of their clothes as they moved to sit against the wall.

"Who are you?" the boy asked. He heard a sharp intake of breath, an indication he startled his cellmate.

"Where am I?" a quiet voice asked.

A girl, then.

"I don't know", he said. "Who are you?"

And they talked. At first about why they were there, which, given the circumstances and their general ignorance of the situation, quickly ended.

They sat in darkness, slowly growing to trust one another and talk more about their lives instead. While they slept a guard would put food and water in their cell. Even the light of the brazier seemed a lifetime away for the boy now.

Naturally, the two grew close. They huddled together at night for warmth, falling asleep to the sound of one another's breathing. When they woke, they had no concept of time. They would simply start talking once more. Their entire world, the darkness, the cell, and each other, went on for days.

One day, the guard did not come while they were asleep. And he did not have food and water with him. Instead, he entered the cell. Grabbing the girl by the wrist, he dragged her from the cell, the boy too dumbfounded to move or speak.

Where are they taking her? he wondered.
Wait! No! Sto--- But they were gone.

He cried that night in silent, racking sobs. When he woke, he was alone, save for the darkness.

A few days later, the guard returned with a prisoner who had a sack on their head. He threw them into the cell, finished off the weak fire in the brazier, and left.

"What did they do?!" the boy asked.

"W-what?" a meek voice answered.

It was not her. It was another girl.

And so they talked. She had many questions about why she was there, of course none of which he could answer. They sat in silence for as long as two people alone in the darkness can. Then she began to talk. Asking questions.

The boy relented eventually. It took longer this time, but he opened up, as he did before, and held her close at night to keep her skinny body warm. She was growing close to him...

Too close... he thought. And he thought right.

For one day, the guard returned, again with no food or water. The boy succumbed to a fit of hysteria, standing between the guard and the girl. Who were these people? Why were they doing this? These were questions he could not answer, and thus he acted on impulse.

The guard struck him down, took the girl by the wrist, and dragged her out of the cell. The boy, beaten and unconscious, at least did not cry that day.

When they brought the third girl, the boy was deranged. Broken within. The boy was not receptive. Indeed, for a few hours (or days?), the girl may have even thought herself alone in the cell. If not for a cough from the boy.

"Is someone there?" she said.
"Please, can someone help me? What is going on?!"

She, like the others, initially panicked and sought answers. Why was she there? What would they do to her? She had heard other girls screaming on her way in, what was going on?

Yet the boy knew what would happen if they grew close. His heart could not bear it. Not again. He remained silent and slept alone in a corner of the cell. Yet the girl would not comply.

"Please, tell me what's going on," she said through sobs. She begged him daily to speak to her. To give her the human contact necessary for people to avoid feeling like lost creatures.

And still the boy remained silent. The silence, the darkness, continued. Though the girl wept nearly every night, it was on one day that her sobs woke him from a faint sleep. Reverberating off the walls, it touched something inside him. Something he could not ignore. And so he crawled over to where she lay, and wrapped his arms around her.

"It's OK," he said.
"Everything will be OK."

The boy could not sleep that night.

He still did not speak much, only providing her the comforts of human touch, of knowing one is not truly alone even in such a hell as this. Yet, for all his silence, the girl was determined to speak enough for them both.

She spoke of her life before she was taken. Of her parents, her friends, her dog. Apparently, she really loved her dog. The boy smiled at that.

"And then, one time, my dad was looking for hours, only to find he was under my bed the whole time!" she said, a tiny giggle escaping her lips. A foreign sound in the darkness. One that was not a tiding of happiness, but foreboding. That night, the boy grew increasingly worried.

When he woke, the boy was breathing heavily, anxiously. The girl's head gently rose and fell in tandem with his chest, her ear pressed up against his heart. He began searching with his foot, trying to feel for the bowl of water or dishes of food. He searched desperately, hoping with what little was left in him that they would be there. That the guard had come while they slept.

And then he felt them with his toes. Relief hit like a thunderclap, then spread through his being like a flood overtaking the land, encompassing everything in its wake. The girl woke and touched his lips.

"You're smiling," she said.
"I like how that feels. You should smile more."

The pair would come to spend almost all of their waking days in constant physical contact with one another. Other than their voices, it was all they had to assure themselves they were not crazy. They were not truly alone.

Time in the darkness had reached a point where it was no use guessing how long it had been. Perhaps many months, perhaps several years, there was no point guessing. Every day the world to them consisted of three stone walls, a row of iron bars, and each other. Until, of course, the guard appeared one day, his face solemn in the flickering light of the brazier, his hands empty.

The boy woke with a start, sitting up. Shapes and shadows ... angles. Seeing the guard standing there, seeing the light of the brazier. How long had it been? His brain frantically tried to remember how to make sense of the images. He glanced down to the small lump of a person, rags wrapped tightly around her, her head in his lap, the light illuminating a tangle of brown hair and the side of a very fragile-looking face.

The guard took a step forward. Fear swelled through the boy, threatening to paralyze him as the guard made his way toward them.

No, the boy thought.
Not this time. Not this one!! Not her!!

He unceremoniously threw her to the ground and lay on top of her. Not in a warm, caring embrace, but roughly, reaching his arms around her waist and locking his fingers together. She started to scream, terrified of the light, the commotion -- an abrupt shift from her normal reality. Then terror overtook her, and she fell limp, and whimpered.

The guard tested the boy. At first a modest prod with his boot, then a swift kick to his side. The boy grunted, but did not relent. He would not. Not this time. Even though something within him had broken from his past encounters, it was slowly being rebuilt, and was now harder than ever. It was through sheer force of will he withstood the blows of the guard, determined not to let go.

The guard eventually left, but still the boy held on tight. The girl began to cry in earnest. She forced herself around, and with the brazier's light, turned to look at the boy. Their gaze met for the first time, locked on to one another. Eyes dancing madly in the brazier's firelight, they took each other in completely in that moment. All that they had shared until then was a fraction of what they learned as they gazed deep inside one another. They had, at that moment, found peace at last.

And a short-lived peace it was.

The guard returned with three others this time. The boy lasted as long as he could, but eventually he was separated from the girl, and the last he saw of her from his swollen eye and blurred vision was her foot as she was dragged down the hallway, out of his vision, before the light was stamped out once more.

The boy hurt. Physically, he was sore, of course, but he hurt on a much more profound level. He was broken again, and certain he was beyond repairing now. There would be no recovery from this. No more girls. He would not go on. That, at least, he could control. He crawled into the corner of the cell, and closed his eyes.

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The darkness surrounded him. He didn't know where he was, or how he got there. The floor felt cool, smooth. Stone?

Where am I? he thought.

Someone lit a brazier and his eyes adjusted to the scene. He was in a cell. Three stone walls -- the fourth a row of imposing iron bars. Someone opened the cell and gave him water. Then they extinguished the brazier.

Darkness. Again.