Viva La Vida

Part 17

There is a list of things Zayn has drawn up for himself that he has decided he is never, ever, ever going to tell anyone about. A sample of the items on the list: the way his fingernails broke and bled as he scratched against the concrete floor in agony, trying desperately to crawl away from the pain; the way red is now his least favorite color because he can no longer look at it without seeing his own blood; the way they would sometimes hold a gun to his head and ask him if he wanted them to put him out of his misery; the way it took every single atom of willpower, every single square inch of defiance, every single stitch of who he used to be to spit in their faces and say no. The way he sometimes sobbed out yes, but was so incoherent in his pain and deliriousness that no one ever heard.

He does not have a word for what happened to him. He knows there are adjectives for it—horrifying, inhumane, gruesome, tragic, scarring—and he knows the clinical terms, the words the doctors use to describe his injuries and surgeries and damaged, but there is no one singleword that he can use to refer to it in his head. Technically, he knows it was torture; he was taken as a prisoner of war and tortured, but torture is a word both too big and not big enough. On the one hand, it makes what happened sound so huge and official and formal, a crime against humanity, a method of interrogation. What happened was none of those things. What happened was a methodic destruction of everything he knew about himself, and these things do not feel official and formal when they are happening to you. On the other hand, the box of the word torture cannot come even close to holding the true and bloody reality of it. Saying the torture aloud does not sound like a throat bloodied from too much screaming. It does not sound like having your entire self torn from your body and reshaped until you can no longer recognize who you are. Zayn is fluent in two languages, and can speak brokenly in a third, and he knows of no word that could encompass every gory and terrible detail of the last year and a half. Those months are nameless in his mind, and until a language dedicated solely to suffering is invented, they shall remain that way.

If there is one thing that Zayn is good at, though, it's shutting his brain off when he doesn't need it. And he certainly doesn't need it now, when he can't even look in a mirror without being yanked back to what happened to him. He needs to be able to shove every single memory into a box, and lock it, and get on with his life. This doesn't exactly work, because there are still some moments that escape and float around in his head like shards of broken glass, but he's been pretty good so far at suppressing these too when they threaten to surface.

But memories insist to be relived one way or another, and honestly, Zayn should know better by now that he is meant to end up anyway but screaming.

Blood vivid and familiar in his mouth, ragged fingertips scrabbling for purchase against the floor, a deep hoarse sob forcing itself from his throat as another blow connects with his abused body, the force of the swing flinging him forward so his face smashes against the concrete. He can't draw air into his lungs anymore; it is thick and claustrophobic with the smell of blood and fear and sweat. He's retching, choking, trying to scream, but all that will come out of his mouth is a constant stream of pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease—

He wants it to stop. He wants someone to make it stop, wants to be wrenched out of the wretched shell of his pain-wracked body, wants to be snuffed out like a candle. Please, God, let there be no afterlife—he cannot fathom the idea of being conscious for eternity. He wants to scattered into enough pieces that none of them will ever feel a thing again.

"Please," is all he manages. "Please, please, please—"

They do not respond. They so rarely do, and mostly likely they didn't hear him anyway; his voice is garbled and worn to a thread. No one is listening; no one cares. He is alone.