Two of Hearts

Prison

When Scorpius wakes up, he finds that he cannot move his arms.

For a few groggy moments, he looks around him, almost curious, eyes hardly needing to adjust in the dark unfamiliar room.

Then he looks down and sees the chains.

Memories come flooding in, and so does pain.

His stomach feels torn with hunger and his mouth is dry to the point of pain. Pulsing agony shoots through his skull. Every breath sends a jolt through his body. His ribs feel broken.

Scorpius groans out a curse and rolls onto his side, going to lift his hand to cradle his head when the snap of his chains stops him. He feebly tugs at the iron that binds him to the ground, just tight enough on the wrists to tear at his skin, and just cold enough to hurt. Who ever chained him gave him enough room to shift his body and sit up on his knees, but severely limited the use of his arms.

Instinctively he reaches into his robe pocket grasping for the familiar feel of his wand. Panicked he digs through his pockets, searching for it like it's his life line.

But he doesn't find it. He was stupid for looking. Of course his captives took his wand. Hope was the most he had. Hope that it was still intact somewhere, waiting to be found.

The absence of it seems to weigh him down.

Cursing again to himself, Scorpius looks around the room, trying to will away the blur disorienting his vision.

The room was ugly and small. Three high gray walls, built from stacked dull slabs of stone, rough, cold, and clammy to the touch. The fourth wall was a heavy construction of metal. Iron bars intercrossed to form a thick padlocked door.

On the other side of the bars is nothing but a thin, winding hallway of patterned stone.

Lanterns hang and flicker on all four sides of the room, barely illuminating anything at all in the cramped space. The light seems unnatural, burning in shades of blue and green, casting ghastly shadows across the stone; like the kiss of a bruise on skin.

A small window with thick crooked glass is carved in the hard stone opposite to the bars, giving a view to nothing but a sliver of bark stripped trees encased in fog outside.

Across the cell, maybe two feet out of his reach, chained and slumped on the opposite wall, is a girl. She is all torn up, riddled with cuts and scrapes and raw skin on her arms that look like nasty burns. Instantly Scorpius' heart is seized with dread as he looks at her motionless body, and for a few terrible seconds he's sure she is dead. But then she moves ever so slightly, clenching her fists, tugging at her chains, and he breaths a shaky sigh of relief. Her eyes are closed, but the pattern of her breathing is off, so Scorpius can tell she's shifting into conscious.

Her loose white dress is nearly as torn up as her skin.
Her matted hair is the bright color of blood.

Scorpius turns away from her as a wave of nausea hits. Right on cue, his head and chest sear with sharp pain. By reflex, he moves to cradle his head and the chains snap, restricting him once again. He curses under his breath.

The pain distracts him, but he tries to focus on how he got here.
Fragments of memories taunt him at the edge of his mind like a toy in front of a cat. Just out of reach.

Blurs of color. Rain. An unfamiliar curse. His mother.

They come to him in snapshots.

There, then gone.

All strung together, he doesn't remember much from the night of his capture, but he remembers enough.

It was raining, and Scorpius had been waiting patiently in the lobby for hours now. Shifting restlessly in his seat, hands clasped together in his lap, trying not to disturb the other families.
It was midnight when he was finally called into the room, heart breathing fast and he had been at the doorway when he'd first heard his fathers sobs.
He hadn't ran. He had just turned away, took steady steps out into the downpour, hoping grief would be an anchor, pulling him deep deep down. Hoping he would drown in it.