Three Futures Enslaved | Dream Team

Bonus: Awesamdude

Sam woke up on the wrong side of a cell.

As a warden, he was used to being the one looking in on a cell, at all the shadows and the lights and usually the mess of stuff on the ground. He wasn't familiar with the view from that side, looking out at freedom.

He sat there for a minute, trying to assess the situation. He could see his keys lying on the ground just out of reach. He could see the entrance to the stairs that led down to the rest of the castle.

The entire scene was backwards. It messed with his brain.

Sam stood up shakily and patted his body, checking for sore spots or wounds. His eyes hurt tremendously, as did the sides of his head. He glanced down at his hands, taking in the spots of green on his skin. More, again. I shouldn't have risked it.

And yet he had, and he still hadn't succeeded in keeping his prisoner in place.

An irritated sigh escaped him. Sam reached out and gripped the bars of the cell, giving them a tug. Nothing, not even a slight bend. He sighed louder.

"I don't want to break out of a cell," he told the emptiness around him. "I'm supposed to be the one guarding a cell."

The emptiness did not answer, as emptinesses usually did.

Sam sighed one more time, just to make a point, then turned to the back of the cell and pulled aside the curtain. The glass wall behind it welcomed him, inviting, even. It would be so easy to break through.

He closed his eyes and scrunched up his face, then shook his head and punched.

The blow went straight through, shattering the glass into millions of pieces both big and small, falling to his feet. Sam opened his eyes tentatively. The pane of glass between two bars had broken, a ragged edge left behind. He looked down at his hand. A couple bloody nicks, but otherwise, relatively okay.

Of course it was. Stupid curse.

Sam shuffled forward, knocking some glass over the edge. He peeked out, watching as the pieces fell down, catching sunlight as they went, until they disappeared in the snow bank below.

A tall drop, one a normal person would never be able to survive.

Unfortunately enough for Sam, he was anything but normal.

He took a moment to contemplate his life choices as he stared down at the ground below. He was about to jump out of a tower and escape a cell he'd been put in because he'd lost a fight and fall into some really cold white stuff. He wasn't even a fighter.

Backwards. All backwards. It was giving him a migraine.

What am I even doing? This is so stupid.

Oh, well. If I stay here for too long, my brain will come up with something worse.

He carefully squeezed his way through the two bars, feeling the sharp edges of the glass still attached to them scratch at his armor, and let gravity take hold.

***

Sam hit the snow with an incredibly dignified oomph.

He groaned and raised his head, blinking melted snow out of his eyes. Surprisingly, he couldn't actually feel the cold. It was more of a presence that was there, but not intruding. Because things didn't usually work in his favor that often, he accepted the fact that he was not freezing to death and moved on.

He turned onto his back and stared up at the broken window above him. Really, Sam wasn't the type of person to leap out windows. He was a designer, an engineer. Not the escapee in some unfair prison outbreak. He wasn't even supposed to be in the prison in the first place.