Cell 6 (open)

[vivianwolf]

"CELL 6"
The numbers on the cell were a reality check for Vivian Wolf.

"This can not be happening, this isn't real." Vivian thought to herself as she squeezed her eyes shut, trying to force a different reality to appear behind her eyelids. Just as the soothing color of lavender began to flood her mind, an orderly shoved her frail body into the now open cell. She stumbled over the threshold and fell to the ground, cutting the palms of her hands and her knees. Crimson blood began to seep from the fresh wounds, and the orderly chuckled in amusement. It wasn't pleasure enough for him to have stripped and hosed down all the pride she had left in her, no, now he had to laugh at her pain. Vivian held back stinging tears, dragging herself up onto a poor excuse for a bed.

The orderly slammed the cell door shut, trying to install fear in Vivian. Unfazed, she wiped the blood on her white shift that she had been given as clothing. The thin fabric did nothing to keep her body heat, and being only 100 lbs didn't help the chill that seemed to lurk in the Asylum. Luckily Vivian's corset had not been taken from her, as she complained that without it her spine could not fully support her (which was a lie of course). The tight hug of the corset's boning, gave her some comfort. She'd been given it by her now deceased mother, when she was old enough to wear it, she spent years whittling her body and waist to fit it. It had almost been an obsession, a desire to please someone who had abandoned her in every way.

It were these obsessive tendencies that had lead to much more serious "problems" for Vivian. Problems that had bound her soul and wrists, and dragged her unwillingly to this hell hole.

"Would anyone here even understand me?" Vivian's thoughts echoed in her mind, floating out into the cell and ward, mocking her...

[Amelia Jacobson]

Amelia was convinced that the man who had dragged her past this ward a week ago was more mad than any of the "deranged" ladies in the establishment. She had been minding her own business in her cell in Ward A and trying to think of some reason to bother waking up the next morning when a hand had suddenly clawed at her shoulder. Turning, she had recognized it as the physician that had yelled at Doctor Bramsfield. The one that had told the doctor as he was walking by with her to leave him something left to lash to his bed. Amelia hadn't even time to cry out before the physician had her by the hair and dragged her out into the dank hallway.

It was all a fear trip. The wretched man had seen how Bramsfield favored her, and now sought to make it his business to terrorize her because he could. Mostly, because he couldn't get a pet of his own. She was seventeen and he was twenty-five. She was small, he was big. The equations all added up. He'd hauled her up and down Ward B for an hour, crooning lewd requests at her, gripping her throat and hissing in her ear that he could so easily put her here where she would never see the light of day again. It was in the midst of this nightmare that Amelia had seen Vivian.

She hadn't known the name of the young woman when she'd first glimpsed her, but the emaciated figure and dark, dark hair had stood out to her out of all the rest. Amelia had been profoundly shaken by the horrors that Ward B had to offer. She felt like her heart was being ripped out wherever she looked. She hadn't cared that she knew none of the girls in the ward. One only had to see several girls held to the wall by skeletons of steel bands once to know that it could not be permitted. That was why she now snuck back into the Hellhole, when the chaos of the dining hour had concealed her from sight.

Tracing the steps back to Vivian's cell, Amelia knelt down just within the shadows so that no passing guard could see. Her pale faerie fingers slipped between the bars and her brown eyes swirled as she looked at the woman's face. "Miss...?" Her voice was soft and barely audible. Still, there was a burning earnestness in it. "Hurry, I've not much time!"

Amelia opened her palm facing upward. She held out a small offering of a hot piece of bread that she'd managed to filch, and a wad of fabric strips that had been made into bandages to staunch bleeding.