Inferno

Chapter 52: Real or Not Real

A/N: Hello!! It is so good to be back! I'm looking at updating every other week right now, so I hope you enjoy! As always, please let me know what you think! Thank you!

Bellamy wished that she could say that she knew exactly how long it had been since she had seen sunlight, but if she was being quite truthful, the days had bled together a long time ago and so time had become nothing more than a construct.

It had been days—weeks—and she didn't even know how to tell what time it was now. If there had been scheduling before, back when Theresa and Ratface Janson were in control, there was nothing now. Guards would come in with new ways to torture her at random times, scientists and doctors would administer all sorts of drugs to her system—

Sometimes she'd see a therapist of sorts. They'd ask a lot of questions. None of it made any cohesive sense. Of course, the thing that made everything compound was the fact that her head was constantly swimming.

It felt as though she had been shoved under a wave and there was no way out. Bellamy didn't know the sensation of drowning intimately. She couldn't say that she had ever been in a lake or an ocean—but she imagined that the sensation she was currently experiencing was akin to that. The fact of the matter was that her head contained a mess of a web inside of it. A web that had been pulled apart at the seams and tugged in every which way except for the way she wanted it to be.

When she had first woken up—contained in a small room with four white walls and not a single thing in it—Bellamy had been restrained. But she had felt the intense sharp pain in her head. She screamed for hours at the pain. At the mess of memories that she no longer could distinguish—fantasy or reality.

She remembered growing up in Chicago—in Dauntless. She remembered the way that the knife had felt in her hand when she had killed Calrun and freed herself from his cruelty. But the other memories? Bellamy was starting to question her own sanity. Because for everything that she remembered in Dauntless, in Chicago, with Four and Tris and Christina—

There were also memories of District 13. Of her mother, Alma Coin—

And it was all so damn confusing. Nothing in her head made sense, nothing made her want to scream more than the confusion of it all. Because she could have sworn that she had been sent straight from Chicago to the Maze. But now? Now her memories contained her being a spy in the Capitol.

Bellamy thought that the worst of it though—the worst had to be the crushing loneliness of the entire thing. Occasionally, she'd hear screams from the room next to hers. It was a woman's voice. She sounded scared—Bellamy hoped she wasn't innocent in all of this. It would be much worse that way. But Bellamy couldn't raise her voice above a damn whisper and it wouldn't have done her any good.

At least when she had been back in Janson's custody, she had Minho. And yes, there were bouts where she was in solitary confinement and by herself. But the time she was spending here was every minute alone. She honestly preferred the times where she was being tortured or talking to a therapist. Because then, at least, she wasn't alone.

What was the end-game here? What was the point of it all? As far as she could tell, there were no negotiations going down between Snow and Coin. As far as she could tell, Bellamy was just a pawn in a much larger game that she was just starting to see.

Before her thoughts could spiral any further in the conspiracy she was carefully crafting in her mind, the door to her cell slid open. Bellamy flinched at the light as it flooded the room. She was comfortable with the darkness now—she lived in it and it was safer here, without the light, without the cold touch of another person's hand.