cyus | Fic: "Int x1; Int y1; Int x2; Int y2;"

Title: Int x1; Int y1; Int x2; Int y2;
Characters: Tosh
Rating: R
Length: 780 words
Summary: One and a half by two and a half, she spent too many months in there.
Notes: Written for

tw_lucky_7. Prompt: Pride.

One and a half by two and a half, judged by the span of one step and that her knee banged smack-dab into the concrete when she lifted her leg for number two and number three respectively. She hadn't gone to her knees yet to measure with hands' breadth and reinvoke the wives' tales measurements that were only used in off-hand sayings that no-one stopped to examine and in stories. That was the beginning, the first days' boredom.

One and half by two and a half, and there had been anger and defiance and this cycle of things that hurt deep down in her gut. Flying metal plates and demands and the constant barrage of words she'd kept up at the door and the metal slit of something ALIVE on the other side every so often.

She wrote letters to her mother in her mind as she paced, apologies and declarations of love she had never really thought before. She tried the Japanese from her grandmother's stories back in Osaka from the two times she'd even been there, and her father's pidgin attempts at home that had made her and her mother laugh but there was nothing more than flower and sunshine and doll, and then she tried in English and then she tried to write in thoughts and old beliefs, just to try something.

She refused to eat and she started to tear her hair out.

Then they'd left her to soil herself for the first time, and a second time, and a third time and--

then she'd eaten her food and not spat it to the ground or into someone's face. And she'd stopped screaming or talking much even when her mouth moved, and kept it all for herself, up there inside. And she started drawing things into the air with her fingers (Is that why she still doesn't watch TV and laughs when Jack gets it into his head to do shadow fingerplay for her in the Hub late at night?)

First it was her knee to bang into the wall, and then her head when she measured in monotone movement to repetitive syllables on her lips. She liked to think she was thinking of her mother, but her uniform was wet and she couldn't-- not then, and she didn't when it was all regrets.

It could have always been worse, they all knew the stories. But no amount of rationalising stops the voices in anyone's head inside a box, with a hood, with no way of seeing, speaking, feeling, hearing, moving or a choice about even the most basic of function. Sometimes she thought she heard laughter then, it wasn't interrogation since no-one ever asked her anything, so maybe it was amusement. At some point, there is nothing left to rationalise, there is nothing left in heads.

It was like this:

flowers

And like that:

cubes

And then like that:

union TRectangle
{
struct
{
int x1;
int y1;
int x2;
int y2;
};
struct
{
double Length;
double Height;
};
};

And then, most of the time:

grey

When she met Jack she stank, she reconstructed that more than she remembered, she must have and there wasn't much in her head, not really. And it wasn't the getting out or the world outside that made her agree to anything; it was nothing rational, nothing that was like the one and a half by two and a half, nothing in figures and numbers or anything in her head.

She is better with machines than humans now, and she'd vowed to continue with the Japanese to remember her mother in some graspable way during one of the early days, in something that wasn't shame. She bought the books and they are stacked on her desk and every now and then she thumbs through them, but what remains in her head whenever Jack comes by and asks her to say something in Japanese, a smile, a pointed look at the opened book, it's flower and doll and sunshine.

Sometimes she worries something broke in her head in that one and a half by two and a half, and that there is nothing she can do to piece it back together. She wishes she could still touch someone. Often.

Yesterday she was working on something vital, top secret and more interesting than the cups of coffee that grew cold on her desk. Then that moment where it clicked and connected just right, the rush of dominos falling in just the right ways at just the right time, and the final keypress for virtual fireworks.

Yesterday Jack said, "You did good."

Today she is waiting for someone to die for it.