regained: day x
taken: day x
witnesses: character (audience; day x)/character (viewed; day x)

The world is insensate oblivion, until it's not.

You awaken from a state of drugged unconsciousness exhausted and aching, tasting a still-flowing nosebleed on your upper lip. Your face is pressed against carpet, prone limbs heavy with the lingering influence of a sedative, the smell of spent fire and ash growing stronger and stronger as reality steadily reasserts itself. After what feels like hours but is really only a few minutes, you manage to open one eye enough to look around. Trying to see, to know, to understand the surroundings that you've been brought to.

Plush covers, velvet drapes, a luxurious bed. All manner of elegant trappings and furnishings....all of it now torched into blackened remains. There's scorch marks on the walls and ceiling. Stupefied, your gaze slips over everything until finally coming to rest on the girl that's standing across the room. She's wearing a light dress that contrasts sharply with her watchful expression of suspicious hostility. Recognition and bitter understanding bleed into your waking thoughts, then. Sharpening them, strengthening them, drawing your mind further out of its doped sleep. Eleanor. The daughter of your enemy, the presence on the other end of the line that's been tapped into your soul.

You slowly ease yourself up into a kneeling position, moving with the wary caution of a cornered animal that knows the odds aren't stacked in its favor, and remain silent once upright without so much as edging closer to the young woman. You only sit, and wait, and watch Eleanor with a mixture of suspicion, weariness........and expectation. You've already grasped the situation; it's not yet clear whether she has, too.

The chemical fingers that had invaded your mind, violated it, hadn't quite managed to overload your brain into simply popping like a sick gray balloon, nor wipe your psyche clean of all sanity and identity. Perhaps the splicing you were forced to undertake had attributed to that resistance? Well, the specifics didn't really matter. Not anymore. The job was done; an empathy bond binds the two of you together now, a permanent and inviolate leash.

She meets your look with a cold stare. The silence stretches. You wait for her to break it first.

After some time, she does, her voice a hostile demand.

"What do you want?"

The tight lines of your body ease a fraction — not a lowering of your guard, but a resignation to the current situation. "Me? Nothing." Your voice is quiet and calm, but your eyes remain wary and alert, untouched by that soft composure. "Slaves know better than to want anything." Feigning a disregard to your own words, you turn your attention to your nosebleed, reaching up to first thumb away the stream and then pinch your nostrils shut to stop the flow. "Well, the preferred term is 'assistant'....but regardless, this is about what the Flock wants. More specifically, what your mother wants." You return to watching her closely, remaining stationary.

"But you knew that already."

It's not a question. Eleanor Lamb was many things, but "stupid" was not one of them. Only Sophia Lamb could be responsible for this latest twist in her daughter's life.

Her eyes narrow, masking confusion and surprise. "Is that right?" She exhales, a bitter smile curving over her lips. "How funny. Mother with her speeches and dreams of utopia, and here she thinks to gift me with a slave. I'm touched." Eleanor's voice is low, dangerously soft. "I hope she isn't expecting to see you back in her service. Except in pieces, perhaps."

This time, the cold cruelty in her smile reaches all the way up to her eyes.