The girl had earned herself a reputation as a model prisoner. In almost half a decade, she had shown no signs of resistance; she had not fought back, she had nor argued or pleaded or cried, not even when she was but a child; she barely spoke out loud and only if she was spoken to first. And she had never, ever attempted to escape.
It only got you punished, that she knew. Against the common knowledge of the place, information, not blood, was the most valuable commodity between those walls. Precious few kernels of it ever made it to the prisoners, each alone and isolated from the others; but a lot of people, she’d found, forgot to keep silent in front of someone that had made herself as unremarkable and as unnoticeable as she had.
One of those kernels was about the punishment. It was never physical, that was always clear -what a waste of cattle and sustenance that would have been-; at first she found that a comfort, for she had always built her life around the goal of avoiding pain. The relief hadn’t lasted, once she crossed paths with those suffering it.
Legend said all fae had the ability to mess with humans’ minds, but that vampires excelled at it and surpassed all others. Life had left her with no refuge beyond her own thoughts, and she had no intention of given them a chance to breach them.
She was patient. She knew if she waited and paid attention, the perfect moment and the perfect plan would come to her, and she would take them when they did. She would not waste her one shot on some desperate Hail Mary; there would be no attempt to escape, because she would succeed. She would leave this place free, unbound, as powerful and bloodthirsty as any of her captors and out of their reach for the rest of eternity.
She had no way of knowing this, for she’d lost awareness of the passage of days long before, but the first part of her perfect plan arrived on the exact day of her fifteenth birthday, in the form of a guard.
The girl never noticed guards. She made a point of it; dehumanization could go both ways, and one did not need to be human to be its target. But she noticed this one, because after she served her food and arranged the wooden spoon next to the plate with compulsive neatness, she became the first guard in all her years as prisoner that looked her in the eye.
Once she became aware of the other’s presence, everything about the woman became noteworthy. Her uniform didn’t fit quite right, and it raised the suspicion that it wasn’t her own, but she was so abnormally and worryingly thin it might’ve as well had other causes. She was older than her, but one could never know how old the fae were. And she had a gnarly scar across her face the girl chided herself for not seeing sooner.
The next incongruity was that she had a kind smile. Yet another, that she knelt down until their eyes were at the same level, equals despite one’s chains and the other’s sword. The last was when she pulled a key from inside her uniform and, to her horror, knew her carefully concealed hiding spot and left it there, her eyes never leaving the girl’s.
Her heart pounded so hard inside her chest she could hear it loud and clear in her ears when the woman gave her the first gentle physical contact she had known in years, before she even knew of her prison’s existence. Both her hands enveloped her own and made the girl feel an illusion of the warmth she had thought long lost.
“I wish I could do more. But you would hate that, wouldn’t you? You need to do this on your own.” If the girl’s voice had worked, she might have tried to disagree. The woman’s smile turned sad and bitter for a second, before it cleared when she took a deep breath as she closed her eyes. She walked to the door before turning back once again, as if she couldn’t stop herself. “I wish you the best of luck, little Aemilia.”
And she walked away and left the girl alone.
Someone else might try to come with a logical explanation. They would been sure the woman had got it wrong, that she had helped the wrong prisoner. But despite never hearing those syllables before, she knew. She felt them as her own, and she knew she was Aemilia.
Or, well. Maybe not quite yet. But she would be.
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