Rosin

4- Aspen

He hardly slept.

When he did it was always broken. He waxed and waned out of nightmares like the waves of the lake back home. When he awoke it was with a scream, sometimes in the middle of the night, expecting the human to somehow be there, waiting.

No sleep, no warmth, no food, only enough water to keep him alive. Barely alive. And nobody.

nobody nobody nobody

He was left alone for twenty hours of the day, alone and shivering and scared inside a cage, and he cried— he wept until he was shuddering without tears, his water all used up.

Fucking humans! Why did they have to ruin everything?! Everything all the time, in every conceivable way. Everything...

Everything just kept getting worse. Countless hours he was left all on his own, and the rest... the rest were just spent screaming. Sometimes in fear, mostly in pain. Mercy was a myth to this human.

Aspen was currently laying on his front in the middle of his cage. He had stopped thinking of it as a cage, or even the cage. It was his cage.
His arms were his pillow. He would have liked to lay on his back, but his wings were still crumpled and bunched into a mess by the wire. They probably would stay like that forever now. Aspen had made the mistake of begging for the human to untie them after the nights of sleeplessness caused by the agony of having them tied up so tightly. Massive mistake. That wire was now Sam's favourite way to make him scream. Every single time those eyes caught a glimpse of him...

every. single. time.

Even if he was already bruised from enduring the daily questioning. Even if he was sleeping. He would wake up in the dead black of the night to find he was being dragging off the floor, fingers pinning him down in the heat of a giant hand despite how he screamed, how he sobbed for him not to...

please please no please don't please

The boy could see the face now. That ghoulish face arched over him in the darkness, grinning with gleaming teeth, eyes just pinpricks of light as he reached down and took the end of the wire... waited, listened to Aspen break down, loving the sound of his shameless pleading... before he twisted and twisted and twisted and

That wasn't even part of the interrogation pain he had to endure. That was just... just what?
Bit by bit. Piece by piece.
Aspen stared blankly at nothing.

I'll make it worse each time you refuse.

Sam had carved into his arm. Contorted his wings on his back until he fell unconscious with pain. Dropped him in and out of that subzero water, hung him upside down over a drop that would unquestionably kill him should he fall... but sometimes, it wasn't even the deliberate things that got to him the most. Just the way the human pulled his hair for no reason at all, flicked at him when his guard was down... he was bundled into pockets and locked in cages, fed with crumbs and drops of water, forgotten unless he was being tormented. There was no empathy for him. Sam treated him like he was nothing, like his life meant nothing.

To him it didn't, Aspen supposed.

What... what more could he possibly do? Surely there was a limit... an end... but he was loosing hope now, if there even had been any to begin with. He couldn't escape. He had tried everything, everything, but everything had ended up being nothing. There was simply nothing he could do. The cage was unbreakable. The human was like some monstrous god. There was nobody coming. And still those words rung— you won't like what happens when I catch you.