S a l e t é I V

XL - Creux - Dix

In that darkness, a mad scramble ensued.

Cassia tried to shake herself free, refusing to cease her struggling for even a few seconds, the strain that days without full portions of Honey had afflicted her with not enough to stop her from flailing against the tide she'd been ensnared by. Through it all, Médée didn't stop hissing orders to her unseen assistant.

"Get the wire! Hurry up!"

"I c-can't see...!"

"You should've been ready!"

Médée gripped Cassia with both hands in a painful hold, leaning down close to her ear as she kept her there, lowering her voice so that it reached barely more than a whisper.

"If you make one sound louder than I'm talking now, I'll gut your throat. You got that? And if you don't believe me, then try it."

Finally, she let Cassia go, giving her a forceful shove that sent her hurtling to the ground and into the stacks of crates and boxes, amongst which were other small, plastic containers and trays of some kind, some of them falling on her as she crashed into them. 

The impact left her unable to retaliate right away, a daze setting in, the sound of Médée rushing to secure whatever it was that she sought prominent now that she was empty handed.

Cassia tried to say something, failing at first as she tried to push herself back to her feet, the older girl already coming up behind her and yanking her up by one wrist, twisting it behind her back in a move that caused a stabbing sensation, rendering her unable to resist without causing herself further pain as she started tying some kind of wire around that same forearm.

"W-why?! Why are you doing this?!"

"Shut it! Stop squirming like a rat and you'll feel much better, trust me."

Such words hardly consoled her as Médée took her other wrist, pulling her over to somewhere that wasn't too far away, presumably a spot further inside the dried out, cold cellar. 

There, a support beam of some kind - rough and wooden - served as the help she'd needed. Using that wire, she took Cassia's other arm, binding them around the beam in a fashion that left her thoroughly trapped.

Her mind was still racing far too quickly for her to be able to begin processing anything that was happening, things flying in and out of her head so quickly that one lapse would have caused them to shatter into mental splinters.

Cellar. Cold. Dark. Why? Painful. Wires, tight, won't budge, can't pull, can't move. Where? Who? Monet, Chief, Spears, the others. Monet.

What... What would Monet do, in the same situation...?

After seeing to it that Cassie was bound, Médée finally began to calm down, stepping back as she began sorting through something again, rattling and metallic sounds echoing with a twang that matched the coldness in the air. Cassia continued trying to shift the wires around her wrists, each move she made only causing them to dig in like synthetic teeth, her assailant no longer concerned with her struggling due to the confidence that she had in how she'd subdued her.

She soon found what she was looking for. 

Placing the lamp down on top of a nearby table, its surface cluttered with dishevelled tools, cutlery and tableware that looked as if it hadn't been cleaned in a decade, she switched it on, the glow it gave off sufficient, yet far from substantial. 

The rest of the cellar was just as worn, the entire interior reeking of abandonment, all of the items contained within nothing more than discarded junk, the walls under the influence of the dry corpse of what might have once been damp or mould, the wooden framework that appeared in places disheartened to the point of looking unsafe. Not even the illumination could breathe so much as a flicker of life into any of it.