A FRACTURE IN THE CONSCIOUSNESS ✓

TYLER

{trigger warning: graphic depiction of violence, torture, sensory deprivation, and anxiety}

Days didn't exist anymore. Not even with Tyler counting how many times the sun has set on the bottom of the chair's arm with his broken fingernails. He'd lost track after his fingers were left bloody stumps, courtesy of Brendon.

When he wasn't passing out from the exhaustion and pain, Tyler teetered a line between agonizing psychosis and dissociating numbness, sobbing and shouting strings of threats until his voice gave out.

The last experiment Tyler remembered was him walking on a treadmill covered in broken glass. The speed slowly picked up until Tyler was sprinting, his wrists tied with wire so he couldn't do anything except for run or fall into a pit of glass.

Eventually, he just collapsed in the glass when his legs gave out beneath him, blacking out long enough for Brendon to untie him and chain him to the wall.

Prior to that, Tyler had managed to break the legs off the chair and tried to unsuccessfully escape, resulting in... a punishment so meticulous and indescribable that not even Tyler with his expanded vocabulary could fathom to put it into words.

Needless to say, he didn't try to escape again.

After Tyler recovered from that, he started with the needles. God, the needles were horrific. Each meticulous prick Brendon made on his body grew into hundreds, maybe thousands of bleeding specks on his body, his skin itching and screaming.

Tyler read a couple books during a weekend about the Salem Witch Trials, and he couldn't recall exactly where he'd read the fact, but he remembered how the townspeople would stick the girls with needles to see if they were witches. He couldn't remember why needles.

Tyler, up until then, didn't have enough energy to scream or think properly anymore, for the IV in his arm was laced with the same drug Brendon knocked him out with. But it didn't matter, because the drugs lessened the pain.

They gained a routine fairly quickly, though Tyler was just trying his best to survive. He would answer whatever questions Brendon tested him with and in exchange, Brendon would give him food.

At that point, Tyler had hardly eaten anything beside the bag of fluids plugged to him to like a lifeline, so he was becoming delirious and desperate. Each little piece he received was a necessity for survival.

Brendon had covered up the window with black tarp and set up blinding white photography lights all around the room, so he never slept. Tyler didn't know when it was day or night anymore. He could've been told he'd been down there for a year and he would've believed it.

Tyler woke up this time around after collapsing a third time when Brendon ties him back on the treadmill, his feet and legs bandaged halfway up his calves. The bandages on his face had been replaced with fresh ones. Brendon was sitting nearly face to face with him, writing something down on a notepad. He had glasses on, and his clothes were the clean of blood.

Tyler gasped, a cool, earthy smell that wasn't there before filling his lungs. His legs were numb. He tried to flex his toes, but nothing below his waist would respond to his metal commands. The small black holes from the cattle prod has scabbed over, almost completely healed.

It must've been what, one week since he was taken? Two? Tyler could only guess from how fast he'd healed, but he wasn't afraid of asking, even if he wouldn't get a straight answer.

Eventually, Brendon noticed he was awake and smiled, setting his clipboard down on his lap. "How are you feeling?"

"How long has it been since you've trapped me in this hell?" Tyler spat, forcing his voice to sound irritable rather than engulfed in pain.