The Other Harry #Wattys2015

Chapter 28

-Chapter 28-

That's it then. Harry's deal with the devil is sealed with my blood. Or at least the threat of it being splashed all up some wall. Which makes this my fault really. For getting my stupid arse captured to begin with, for not kicking Shit Face in the nuts back in the corridor so he'd shoot me in the head, my fault for saying I loved Harry in the freezer and for not getting out of this mess at the first, or the second, or the third opportunity I had.

Unsurprisingly, after it happens, all of these grand promises the old man made Harry don't begin to materialize. On TV and in Films they ply on the rise starlets with champagne and fast cars and a thousand nightclub montages where diamonds rain down from the sky and people's smiles glitter like white gold. With us, we're still shivering from cold, Harry's nose is red, his eyes are dull and haunted. His clothes are ruffled, torn and dirty- much worse than mine now I've borrowed something from Kerry- he's been bruised and cut.

The old man looks rather pleased with himself. Walks away after a knowing look to Not-Olivia, muttering something about having to make a call but his Skype app is forever being a temperamental little so and so. We're not taken to a Green Room filled up with bottles of purest mineral water and M&Ms with all the green ones taken out. Instead we're put into cages.

And I don't mean figurative ones either. Like emotional cages of our own doing, or how celebrities have their gilded cages. I mean actual cages. Five foot high animal enclosures is the best way to describe it. With just enough room to sit down but little else and a smell that says mine could definitely have belonged to a monkey at some point, I'm half expecting there to be straw on the floor and a little water bottle attached to the bars.

The room is sterile with white walls and tables and lab equipment while the faint hum of machines rises over the silence. But the charts and the stink of cleaning fluid and surgical items and big computers don't remind me of a hospital like you'd expect it to. Really, this is the complete opposite of a hospital. Those are full up with life, and this is clean and quiet and unnatural. It's more like a morgue than anything else.

It occurs to me that I could kick up a fuss. Pound my fists on the cage and make it rattle, start screaming and howling like the animal they're treating me as. If I make a nuisance of myself, its not like they can do anything about it either. Harry has to behave or they'll cut me up into bits and torture me and all that other stuff, but I don't have to do anything. It's not like they can destroy one of their precious originals.

So in a way, while my life hangs on a knife edge and I could be murdered at any moment...they can't actually touch me.

I think.

This surge of power doesn't last long. The only guard in the room is large and disinterested, one hand on his gun and the other holding a slim paperback book with a title I can't see from my cage. A quick look at Harry shows he's not really in the mood to watch me yell at someone. Not really in the mood for much at all really, I don't think.

He'd come alive when he was yelling at them to leave me alone. But now he's slipped back to hunched up, totally silent and turned away.

I slip my hands through the bars of my cage, close to his own. He's backed up in the farthest corner from me and doesn't take it. So I pull it back, silently, miserably and look at my arm. At my own scar. The 1 carved there is still a mess of swollen skin and scabbing which I drag my fingertips across.  It helps take my mind off the pain in my abdomen while I think about those other girls who'd happily scarred themselves, and about the ones at the concert I couldn't save. I think about my little sister, about Joey and my Mum too and a whole new pain washes over me.

The next time I see them they'll be smiling vacantly too, unconcerned at their complete lack of free will.

"You were right."