Restoration (A Walking Dead Fan-Fic)

Chapter 9

A/N: A small quick update for you all while I work on the next chapter which things will certainly get interesting. Thanks to Kyokkou for reviewing as well as to those who fav/followed Restoration! Please leave some feedback, give me that motivation to continue! The more motivation, the faster they get published. I constantly think of this story day and night...let me know what ya think! Until then. Enjoy!

Restoration: Chapter 9

Victor sat on a footstool before her.

He cleaned up well. Showered, shampooed, shaved, and combed, he was presentable in any company, and any mother, seeing him on the arm of her daughter, would think that he was a prize. His black V-neck highlighted his sculpted shoulders and chest, and his worn out jeans fit his physique like a dream.

Alexis looked good too. She was dressed in black penny loafers, white knee socks, a pleated plaid mini skirt, a tie front halter sleepwear bra top.

Victor was pleased to see that she had regularly groomed herself in his absence, as she was instructed. It was not easy for her, taking only sponge baths and shampooing her glorious hair in the sink.

He constructed this room for others, who came before her, none of whom was in residence longer than two months. Until he'd met his Lexi, and learned what an engagingly independent spirit she was, he'd never imagined that he would insist on anyone staying this long. Consequently, a shower had seemed unnecessary.

"You're such a luscious piece." He told Alexis, and his voice is muffled by the soundproofing, as if he were speaking from inside a coffin, buried alive.

She did not reply or even acknowledge his presence. She was in her silent mode, as she had been without interruption for more than six months. These days, she never looked at him but stared at a point above his head and off to one side. If he were to stand up from the footstool and move into her line of sight, she would still be looking over his head and to one side, though he would never quite be able to see her eyes shift in avoidance.

"I want to hear you crying, lost and crying. I want to smell the purity of your tears. I want to feel the exquisite texture of your screams, know the clean smell of them, and the taste of your terror. There's always that. Always that." He said. "Once in a while, I brought one of them back to this room— and always for the same purpose."

"The most intense experiences of my life have all taken place in this room, Lexi. Not the sex. Not the beating or the cutting. That all comes later, and it's a lagniappe. First, I break them down, and that is when it gets intense."

Her chest was tight. She could breathe only shallowly.

He said, "The first day or two, they all think they'll go out of their minds with fear, but they're wrong. It takes longer than a day or two to drive someone insane, truly and irrevocably insane. You're my twelfth captive, and the others all held on to their sanity for weeks.

"One of them cracked on the eighteenth day, but three of them lasted a full two months. Psychological torture is so much more interesting and difficult to undertake than the physical variety, although the latter can be undeniably thrilling," He said. "The mind is so much tougher than the body, a greater challenge by far. And when the mind goes, I swear that I can hear the crack, a harder sound than bone splitting— and oh, how it reverberates."

"When they crack, some of them writhe on the floor, thrash, and rend their clothes. They tear at their hair, Lexi, and claw their faces, and some of them bite themselves hard enough to draw blood. They maim themselves in so many inventive ways. They sob and sob, can't stop for hours, sometimes for days, sobbing in their sleep. They bark like dogs, Lexi, and screech and flail their arms as if they're convinced that they can fly. They hallucinate and see things more frightening than I am to them. Some speak in tongues. It's called glossolalia. Do you know the condition?"

Victor moved over to the bed and stood over the woman.

"Maybe I could get a word or two out of you if I set you on fire. What do you think?"

Victor stooped, lowering his face toward Alexis's, until they are nose-to-nose and says, "Maybe I'll put you in the ground and cover you up. Would you speak then, Lexi?"

No answer.

He waited.

He knew that she heard, but she was clever at maintaining a solemn face.

He smiled. He stroked her face reverently, tracing a path from her cheek to her chin. "You by far are the most stubborn, but that only makes you interesting. But I'll break you too, and when you crack comes, Lexi, it'll be like no other. Glorious."

He angled his lips over hers and took her mouth in a kiss.

A smirk etched itself on his face and he chuckled darkly as the two went for a walk in the moonlit prison perimeter. She had a radiant smile and he desperately wanted to take that away from her. He will soon shatter her completely. But she is tough, this woman, with surprising inner resources.

Good. The challenge thrills him.

The worst horror of his rampages was not the pain and fear that he inflicted, not the blood, not the mutilated cadavers. The pain and the fear were comparatively brief, considering all the routine pain and anxiety of life. The blood and bodies were merely aftermath.

The worst horror was that he stole meaning from the unfinished lives of those people he killed, made himself the primary purpose of their existence, and robbed them not of time but of fulfillment. His base sins were envy— of beauty, of happiness— and pride, bending the whole world to his view of creation, and these were the greatest sins of all, the same transgressions over which the devil himself, once an archangel, had stumbled and fallen a long way out of Heaven.

"Rick Grimes." He said. "You have something that belongs to me."