Work Text:
Prisoner is snapped out of a reverie by a growing pain on her wrist, which she looks down to find burned to the point of smoking. Prisoner had a habit of disconnecting from the world around her; when the world around you stops giving you new information for long enough, your brain learns to stop wasting energy on trying to process sensory information, and her arbitrarily-long time spent in that little basement in that little cabin in the middle of those woods she never saw had trained her to do that quite well. The others, as she knew, had experienced the same thing she had, but it was different for her, more significant in some way. Why else would that be her name, "prisoner". "The prisoner". "chapter 2 the prisoner", as her legal forms inexplicably read. She was, as the most fundamental part of who she was, stuck here. Stuck in this fucking place, with these fucking people.
Her wrist is burning. Why is her wrist burning? She's at the register right now, not somewhere she should get burnt. Well, it's burning because the shackle is hot. Why would the shackle be hot? Well, that one's easy, it's because the chain it attached to is sitting in fire. No, that doesn't make any sense.
The chain is sitting in a patch of fire, just behind the counter, which is connected to a larger patch of fire, which was on more or less her entire field of vision. She hasn't received any training on what to do in such a situation, but she knew that A. She needs to move away from the fire, and B. The only way she could move is towards the fire.
'I have a good head on my shoulders', is something she sometimes tells herself- specifically, something she started telling herself after learning that cage is an iteration on herself, or something to that effect. Regardless, when the only thing you have to work with is your mind, it naturally becomes a point of pride. She knows she isn't a genius, and that she doesn't have the transcendent kind of awareness the manager or Wild did, but she likes to think she had an edge on most of her coworkers in terms of general competence. That is to say, she's fairly confident that if there was some plan to be formed that would reliably deliver her to safety, she would have found it by now. That rational, reasoning mind she was so proud of had dutifully compared every variable, calculated every angle and distance to the exits, estimated the material strength of the now red-hot metal, the burning wood, the melting plastic, her sizzling flesh and the bones beneath. There was nothing, she concludes, at first in the same matter-of-fact tone she liked to speak in, then in confusion, then twice in anger, and again in fear that she can't suppress anymore.
"...Help? Is, can- somebody fucking help me, god dammit!"
A wave of dark, swampy water crashes through the windows, extinguishing the fires and cooling her chains before her exhausted, harrowed mind could process that the sunlight had disappeared from the windows outside. She fears, for a moment, that she might drown, but the water drains before that became a serious threat. The water is rancid in her mouth as she coughs it out, and is almost viscous as it drips from her hair. A dark, ghostly figure floats above her now; there's something familiar in her eyes before she vanishes.