Nora

Awake

The eyes of her beloved had sunken into his head, his lips a distant fog in the catalyst of her mind. His touch, forgotten into the winds of time, as much as most of his being. For not his name, she'd had misplaced his name too. His name, his voice, they were all she held left of the places she could recall, not as vivid as he, but vivid nonetheless. It hurt. It hurt to the point of screaming, the red splashing down her nostrils from the extent of her overworked brain.

His voice, the words such a mundane phrase, kept her pain at bay. She could hear him, the dulcet tones of his words a mantra that kept her in a place of limbo. His soft spoken nature, a near identical feeling to the other forgotten phrases of himself, a reminder, though.

She knew his name.

His voice.

Nothing else.

The red came back, creeping down her face and dripping onto the tiled floor below them. Nothing was real. He wasn't real. Had it not been for her screaming, she'd have thought she didn't really exist. How could she?

He was the only constant. He flooded her mind, the words repeating until she began to flood her feelings with screams. More noise. It drowned his beautiful voice out. It suffocated the wording, and hid him from her.

"I can only beg your forgiveness, and pray that my love will keep you warm."

________________________________________

Her eyes snapped open to a world full of ice and gloom, the bars surrounding her greeting her gaze with a lonely silence. All else around her, however, was loud. She wondered how she'd gone to sleep with the shouting, the screaming, and the incessant dripping of water near where she was located.

She sat up, flinching and crying out from the searing agony that ran down her body. She forced herself on to her elbows, her eyes adjusting to the shadows of the darkness around them, and could hardly make out the vague shapes of a cell-like space.

Not a vague shape, she thought, the area finalizing into an actual cell. Where am I? She gazed around in a daze, the sight of an uncomfortable metal bed and puddles of water cementing the idea of a lockup.

"Yo, bitch," someone spoke up near her.

She glanced over to her side, the pain in her neck flaring a moment. "Wha. . .?" It was all she could muster, at the moment, her muscles seizing in distress and her body preparing for the onset of shuddering.

Next to her cell stood a tall woman with curled dark hair and sepia eyes, glinting like an animal. She wore a black and white prison garb, cut near her midsection and tied into a rough bow to show off her stomach. She stepped into a fading ray of light, her russet skin reflecting in the puddles that surrounded them, toning the cell so they could both see. The woman reached out, grabbing the other's wrist and turning it around, roughly.

"Ouch!" She yelped, only for the other woman to snap back, telling the first to be quiet.

It took a few seconds, but the second woman let her go, smirking. "So. . .Nora, is it?"

"What?" The first woman asked, shaking her head. "Nora? I don't know what you're talking about."

"That's your name, idiot. It says so on your wrist-band," the black haired woman answered, puckering her lips and picking at her nails. "Did they beat the memory out of you?"

Nora furrowed her eyebrows. "Beat me?"

The second woman sighed. "Are you just gonna question everything I say? Because, I promise, we'll have a problem real fast with that."