There Isn't A Word For It✔️

He swam through a sea of pitiless lethargy, kicking towards the surface.

Awareness was a vague and pale gray thing, barely registering along the distant periphery of his mind. Something had woken him, hooked a needle-thin spear through his consciousness and begun the uncertain process of dragging him back to the rocky coast of waking.

He didn't want to be awake.

Awake meant pain.

Awake meant despair.

In some unknowable way that was paradoxically worse, awake meant hope.

He struggled against it, briefly, wanting the soul-numbing bliss that was sleep.

"Daniels, get up."

Something smacked hard against old metal, and as he jerked into full alertness, he already knew what it was.

"Come on, I haven't got all night." He recognized the tired irritation in the guard's voice and forced himself to sit up, rubbing sleep from his eyes. Banging against old metal again, now joined by grumbling from above him. It was a sound as old as prisons, he imagined: the smug guard clacking his nightstick against the bars of the cell.

Only now it was no longer a nightstick but a shockstick that could deliver enough volts to drop an ox in its tracks.

"I'm up," he said, swinging his legs off the slab and planting his feet on the corroded deckplates beneath. In a moment of uneasy intuition, Daniels had worn his shoes to bed. Somehow, he'd known they would come for him again this night. He reached up, gripping the top slab where his cellmate shifted and grumbled. Pulling himself up, he ducked his head to avoid banging it on the rusty underside. That was all he needed, to cut his scalp on the edge once again.

He'd been lucky enough to receive medical attention the first time he'd done it.

"You good and ready, Daniels? You want me to fetch your slippers and coffee?"

"I'm up," he repeated tonelessly, rubbing his eyes as he walked slowly forward. He'd learned very early on that it was best not to engage at all when they were screwing with you. Not all the guards were human trash, but it could be hard to tell, and you didn't want to give them any more of an excuse to 'accidentally' trip you down some stairs than they already had.

Honestly, he preferred the mechs.

"Come on, you know the drill," Benson groused, a look of disappointment darkening his narrow, pallid face.

Daniels just nodded and turned around, putting his hands together behind his back. A second later, Benson slapped the cuffs on his wrists with a practiced ease.

The guards never liked dealing with him because they knew they couldn't screw with him during one of his jobs like this. Of course, that wasn't perfect protection. Hell, if anything, it just gave some of the more sadistic bastards motive to go looking for ways to hurt him without one of his handlers noticing, and it wasn't like Daniels was going to snitch and whine about it. His current position, much as he didn't understand it, was a study in walking a razor's edge. He knew they wanted to keep him safe and focused for the dives, and that they were willing to cut him a little slack in exchange for his cooperation...

But he also knew there had to be limits.

Consequently, he asked for as little as possible.

Already, he felt as though he had cashed in on some unknown, but probably huge, quantity of that goodwill when he'd requested a new cellmate.

One who didn't whisper awful things in his ear while he tried to sleep. One who he wouldn't wake up to standing over him, staring with wide, unblinking, bloodshot eyes.