When We Met

CH 22 Rosaline

The dank chill of the cell seemed to seep deeper into my bones with each passing hour. I paced the confines like a caged panther, muscles coiled with restless apprehension as the darkness pressed in from all sides. How long had it been now? Three days? A week? Longer?

Time had taken on an amorphous, dreamlike quality in this wretched place. With no natural light to carve the featureless days into defined cycles, my mind struggled to maintain its customary razor-sharp focus and grasp on reality. All I could gauge the passing of interminable hours by were the haunting echoes reverberating through the corridors - distant taunts and guttural shouts punctuated by the occasional muffled scream of anguish.

Each hollow, warped utterance that reached my confines felt like nails grinding across my soul, dredging up agonising wonderings about the fates of the three people who mattered most. Were those rictus howls torn from the lips of my brothers in arms, Alejandro and Matias? Did those mocking jeers mask the sounds of torments being inflicted upon their bodies and minds by our sadistic captors?

The thought of Alejandro's gruff, perpetually aloof demeanour being shattered by fresh violations made my gut twist into knots. That consummate soldier had kept me tethered to defiance and perseverance through so much darkness and turmoil during our shared operations against the Bolivian narcotraficantes. His was always the first voice raised in staunch rejection of any surrender or compromise, no matter how overwhelmed or grim the odds became.

To imagine that steely core of uncompromising integrity being forcibly unmade sent spasms of protective rage coursing through me. If anything...permanent...had been perpetrated upon his body or spirit, there would be no corner of this earth's sphere far enough for the transgressors to flee my wrath.

Then there was Matias - the heart and soul of our tight-knit team dynamic, and perhaps the closest thing I'd known to a true friend amidst the bleakness of our harsh existence. His deceptively meek persona and scholarly fascination with history and antiquities masked a core of iron few could have foreseen. How many times had his extensive knowledge and brilliant tactical insights spelled the difference between our survival or utter obliteration at the hands of sadists and butchers?

Wispy and unimposing in stature, Matias nevertheless embodied an unfathomable, almost childlike inner resilience that snapped back from each fresh trauma visited upon his slender frame. I'd seen him endure tortures that would have reduced even grizzled mercenary captives into whimpering wrecks, never conceding a single scrap of intel or begging for mercy, no matter how savagely the cruelties escalated.

The very notion of him shattered and confessing beneath the Walsh family's depraved interrogation filled me with a grief so profound it eclipsed even the screaming anguish pulsing through every laceration and hairline fracture the various sadists had inflicted upon me in the past.

But perhaps most galvanising was the worries surrounding my revered master and mentor, Yelena. She had plucked me from the obscurity and destitution of my provincial upbringing and forged me into an instrument of sublime lethality, linking me to a higher calling of combating the world's most pervasive evils. The sheer depths of Yelena's combat lethality and indomitable spirit beggared comprehension, a perfect fusion of East and West that turned the human form into an indescribable vector of explosive violence and grace.

I shuddered to think what fresh new profundities of agony the Walshes might be inflicting upon her...or worse, what horrors could potentially be unleashed if they actually managed to breach her formidable mental disciplines through protracted debasement and torment. Having witnessed her descend into zones of pure, animalistic abandon in the midst of our harshest training sessions, I was one of the only souls alive graced with a true glimpse behind the veil of Yelena's vast capabilities. What monstrous, arcane forces might stir beneath her surface composure if sufficiently provoked?

These dizzying notions all swirled through my addled psyche in an endless, maddening loop, layered beneath the scattershot sensory assaults of the surrounding nightmare. Time and space grew increasingly uncertain as the endless parade of screams, taunts, and intermittent explosions of violence echoing through the walls steadily shredded away at my faltering sanity and grip on reality.

Only the barest thread of defiant focus kept me tethered, a fluttering spark of martyred purpose that refused to sputter out even in this choking miasma of darkness and desperation. Perhaps it was stubborn ego alone propping up my resolve at this stage. Or maybe a deeper, more transcendent fortitude forged from equal parts love and loyalty to the aspects of my life that granted it true meaning.

No matter the root cause of my fragile tenacity, it flickered with renewed intensity as a solitary pinprick of gentle illumination at last pierced the metaphorical gloom. The heavy door grating open, admitting the sight I had craved for what felt like tainted eternities - the kindly old nurse clutching her worn medical satchel to her ample bosom.

In her wake trailed the scents of a world beyond that felt like the stuff of wild fantasies - cinnamon, antiseptic and damp autumn all mingled into a soothing, impossibly grounding bouquet that set my racing heart momentarily at ease. With her entrance, it felt as though the tide of insanity and hopelessness battering at the ramparts of my inner sanctum had receded, if only for a few scarce moments.

"Easy there, darlin'," the matronly woman crooned, her throaty drawl feeling like the caress of a sun-warmed breeze against chilled skin. "I know it's been a minute since my last visitin' you. Figured I best check on those war wounds 'fore they turn interesting colours if you catch my drift."

I regarded her warily through the haze of my fugue, something vaguely itching at the corners of my awareness that this wizened figure was far more than she appeared at face value. But the momentary illusion of grounded reality persisted as she bustled about setting her kit atop a crate and ushered me to settle upon it with surprising firmness.

"Now you just let ol' Sally have a good look-see, sugar," she chided tenderly, calloused but shockingly gentle fingers probing the patchwork of bruises and abrasions crisscrossing my forearms and midriff. "Still bein' stubborn bout them bandages, I see. You're lucky pride like that didn't get you kilt in the wastelands..."

Her words momentarily pierced the fog shrouding my disjointed thoughts, summoning fragmented flashes of recollection. Visions of soaring spires of Metalloid wreckage jutting against the toxin-bruised sky like broken fangs. Howling windstorms that could flay flesh from bone. Faces and names dredged from my earliest brushes with true depravity and the blissful ignorance that preceded it.

But just as quickly as those fleeting impressions arose, they slipped like smoke between outstretched fingers, replaced by fresh eddies of turmoil and self-doubt. Still, Sally's presence felt anchoring, steadying in ways I could scarcely quantify. As though she radiated warmth, comfort, and stout-hearted expectation like some phantasmal matriarch from the misty borderlands bordering damnation.

"My...my family..." I rasped, throat feeling parched and constricted with bone-deep dread. "Do you...do you know their fates? Are they..."

I couldn't even bring myself to fully vocalise my deepest terror, feeling pinned beneath the weight of that unthinkable potentiality like the entire weight of a planet had settled upon my shoulders. But the nurse - no, Sally - seemed to instinctively grasp the undercurrents of my hollow quavering. Her perpetually creased features softened further with naked empathy that further deepened the mystery of her nature.

"Well now, let's not go borrowin' disasters from the days ahead before we see 'em, sugar"