Through Stone

"Hey… psst, what's your name?"

The question seems childish and arbitrary, now. The kind of thing that you ask on the first day of kindergarten as you sit among other little girls with their blonde hair in braids, dressed in special "first day" dresses. It's not the sort of question that you ask as an adult.

But, with these walls in between myself and the only person I expect to be the least be of kind to me, I expect that arbitrary and childish is somewhat acceptable.

A few moments pass before someone answers me. A boy's voice. He sounds young, but I know that the sound of someone's voice, or even their appearance, is no indication of age. After all, I'm close to four-hundred myself, and I look nothing close to it.

"Al-Alec…" He panted out. I flinched internally for his sake. They had only left a couple of hours ago, and when Audrey came to "play" (as she so lovingly called it) the pain hardly ceased before she was back. I resisted the urge to groan. She would be by for me before long.

"You sound like Hell. No offense."

"I'm pretty sure I look like more than Hell."

I shrugged, even though I knew he couldn't see the movement. "People do say we could be related to fallen angels, so maybe looking like Hell isn't too bad."

A dry laugh seeped through the mildew covered stones. "Are you trying to say you think I could be handsome?"

Boys are so typical. They think the smallest mention of potential good looks is an indication of attraction. "Every vampire is handsome, doll. Don't psyche yourself up."

"I won't be very handsome soon if she doesn't leave my face alone."

"Has she cut it? She did mine a few days ago, but… I don't think it will show up very well. Not unless she comes back and decides she needs to make it deeper."

A silence. Some scraping of stone, and suddenly, his voice was a little bit clearer, louder.

"Wh—what…. Did she write?"

"Dunno," I answered, and I lifted my hand up to trace the cuts on my forehead, trying to figure out what she had carved. "Probably something demeaning and nasty. Like herself."

"I wouldn't go talking like that. You wouldn't want to piss her off. Think she's bad now? She's only been here when she's in one of her good moods."

I rolled my eyes and pressed my forehead against the stone so I could hear him better still. "She cut anything into your face, yet?"

"No. But she keeps acting like she will," He answered. His voice shuddered. "'A' for Audrey. She keeps tracing it with the blunt side of the knife."

"I… " I held my tongue for a second. Who was I to give any kind of advice? "It hu-hurts less if you don't tense up. Try to keep your face relaxed."

I couldn't get to him. I couldn't protect him, but I could trying and help it hurt less. And perhaps, being next to one another, would help everything else as well.

"I'll keep that in mind. H-have…has anyone besides….?"

"Audrey?" I asked, the name slipping like poison off of my tongue. "Kiersten. I don't think she had much fun with me."

"Why is that? She had loads with me." A bitter tone had seeped in. I wanted to ask why, but now was not the time to bombard him with pressing questions.

"Her power is to make you want to hurt someone you love. But there is no one that I love, and no one who loves me." I stated matter-of-factly. It wasn't some kind of pity party. There just wasn't anyone that I was particularly close to.

Tilting my head back, I closed my eyes for just a few moments. The air was muggy and stiff, but if I tried hard enough, I could imagine that I was anywhere else. The stone beneath my feet became warmer, and I imagined birds singing in the distance.

"Guess you'll be getting a lot of Audrey, then."

"Lucky. Me."

I couldn't determine how long it had been since Audrey had been in my cell. It felt like too long. Usually, she wasn't gone more than a few hours. To be honest, I couldn't imagine what someone like her would do in her free time. Kill children, I assumed, find virgins to sacrifice.

My eyes flicked to the door, watching for a shadows movements, listening for the click, click, click, of her black stiletto's. She had to be back soon. The anticipation killed me.

"You know, you haven't told me your name, yet," He called, and I jumped out my anxiety-ridden reverie.

People didn't often as for my name. But, then again, most of the interaction I had with humans involved hunting them, and any communication I had with my own kind was typically forced and brief, or acutely unpleasant. Come to think of it, I don't think anyone had asked my name in over a hundred years.

My name wasn't even the same as it is now, a hundred years ago.

"S-Saoirse." I stammer. Even my name, the one that I came up with myself, felt unfamiliar on my lips. An alien word, filled with uncertainty. I was ashamed at myself. I had chosen that name for a reason, and now, I felt it reduced to little than nothing. "My name is Saoirse." This time, it came out with a small bit of certainty.

"Seeeeerr-shaaah?" Alec stretched the word out, and snorted. "Sounds funny. Irish, or something?"

"Something like that," I huffed. I didn't like how he said it. "I chose it for the meaning, more than the origin."

"Name meanings are stupid. Half of the time, they don't match the personality of the person they're naming at all. Do you know what "Alec" means?"

"Defender of man." I answered without a beat.

"Yeah. Exactly. Does anyone think I'm going to be defending any bitch, except for myself?"

"I mean it is defender of man, not men. You are man. You defend self. See, perfectly explanatory."

"Saoirse," he replied, and I wanted to breathe out in relief at the fact that he didn't utterly destroy my name this time. (Not that I had done much better, myself), "I'm currently shackled to the floor with barely six feet of give. I don't think I'll be defending myself any time soon."

My eyes trailed down to the metal band around my ankle. Somehow, I had forgotten that they would have done the same with him, as they had to me. That was why it hurt so much, whenever Audrey came to play with him.

With each of his cries, I remembered my own agony.

"We'll be alright, won't we?" The question slipped in unexpectedly. I sounded like a child, begging for assurance. First the name thing and now this. What was I, five?

The chain ground against the stone as he (I assumed) adjusted his position. "I don't want to be the person who answers that. I've… I've seen people after Audrey's done with them. It's never a pretty sight."

"We just have to keep calm, and not lose ourselves. That's the one thing she can't take."

He scoffed. I imagined him rolling his eyes. "She can try, believe that. And she likes a challenge. Don't talk about how she'll never be able to break you. It will only make her want to see you shatter more than ever before."

"You ever wonder how someone gets like that?" I questioned, "All deranged and fucked up?"

"Some people have bad childhoods…or traumatic experiences, but I don't think anything like that happened to her. She probably just…came out, looking for something to make cry."

My life hadn't been the most amazing, but I like to think that I turned out alright, all things considered. Before Audrey, I hadn't cried in over a hundred and fifty years. I cursed myself for letting her get to me that day.

"How long have you been in here, for?"

He had already been in the cell beside me when they brought me in a little less than a week ago.

"I think almost two weeks. I tried to keep track. Make marks on the walls, memorize the patterns of people coming and going, but… it just all blurs together. You can't tell one day from another."

"You seem to have held up pretty well, given how long you've been here."

"I don't know if that should be taken as a compliment, but thanks. She hasn't been around as much as the first few days. I think some other kind of task is taking up her time."

Whatever that task was, maybe it would last for months.

"How about the other ones? I know there are two guys, who-"

"Eric and Felipe. They've come around, too. Felipe isn't very creative. He's about a quarter as bad as Audrey. Eric, on the other hand, is awful in a different way."

I bit my lip, but the question slipped out of its own accord. "Do I want to know?"

A low sigh came from him, and there was a strange sound that filled the air- like nails on stone. I wondered if he did what I had started, and marked the days as they passed in tallies on the wall.

Aro said I would be in here for forever. Eventually, the space I had to mark the days would disappear entirely. Of course, in my life, I have learned that forever hardly really means anything more than "a very long time"

Eventually, he answered my question. "He likes to mess with your mind. He picks it apart, sees what makes people tick. Eric doesn't see other's as people. He sees them as objects, and he loves to see what they're made of."

I tensed, my eyes trailing to the door. Why couldn't they just come and get it over with already? With each moment that passed, I felt my chest grow tighter with anxiety. It wouldn't be long now. I just knew it.

It was mostly a question of who would come to play this time.

"Who came last time? Audrey?"

"Yeah. Couple of hours now, I guess."

It felt selfish to ask of such horrible things, but in times like these, it was some of the only subjects we had to share with one another. Pain felt less unbearable when it was shared with someone else.

"Are you alright? Does anything hurt?"

"Probably, not as much as it did the first time. When she's not feeling particularly creative, she'll just whip me until she gets bored."

"Does she make you count and start over every time you miss one?" I inquired, a dead sort of tone to my voice. "She does with me. One session lasted four times as it should have because I kept forgetting to count."

"Second day I was here, she made me count for every year I'd been alive . I missed the second to last strike and she made me start over again. I was screaming before the second session was half way done."

Though I hated the imprisonment itself, I had to admit, that having someone to talk to made everything a little easier. I wondered awful it had been, to be alone in the dark, filled to the brim with absolute agony.

No one to talk to, just you, your thoughts, and a blistering pain.

"Well, we've gotten this far. If we've survived for this long, then things can't really get much worse from here, right?"

I hated how forcibly positive my voice sounded. Truth be told, I didn't believe what I said. Torturers didn't give up when their prisoners got stronger, or became used to their methods. That wouldn't be fun for them. Instead, they came up with knew ways to inflict pain. We would never get used to them. And there were at least six of them. They could share ideas, come up with new things to try on us.

There was a part of me that wanted to ask, what he had done- but another part, a stronger voice inside of my head, told me not to. I didn't know if I would be able to handle the answer.

I knew what I had done, why I was being punished. Whether or not it was a fair or justified punishment was up to who you asked. I suppose, from a moral standpoint, I hadn't been the best person to ever live. But I tried.

No one is born evil. No one even thinks themselves to be evil. As any dictator, any warlord, and they will have a reason for their actions. Evilness is a trait assigned by society, not by individuals. Can someone be evil and not admit it to themselves? Of course. Actions, beliefs as a whole can be viewed as evil or corrupt, but those who believe such things that others view to be immoral, will never admit that their thoughts are evil.

So, am I evil? I don't think so. Are their thousands of people who I have hurt, who have suffered because of me? Yes.

But I do not think myself to be evil. After all, in the end, I had a reputable goal.

"You must be deep in thought," He mused, breaking me out of my reverie. I closed my eyes, head tilted back against the smooth stone.

"A little," I allowed myself to admit. Without conversation, I feared that I might die of boredom before Audrey or whoever could come back to have her fun with us. "There isn't much else to do in here, is there? Other than to sit and wait…and count the stones and the cracks. But after that, there isn't anything else to do."

"I've found in my life that my own thoughts tend to frighten me more than reality." He said, after a half a beat of silence.

"Maybe you just have a disturbed mind." I pointed out, a grin that he could never see creeping onto my face.

He responded with deathly seriousness. "That might be so." He added, "What about you? You don't seem to be the kind of person who thinks of daisies and dolphin. What do you think of when there is nothing for you to do?"

"I want to change things," I said, and I found that the words fell from my lips without me needing to think of them. "The world, I mean. I want to make things better for everyone, in the end. Unfortunately, that means that things have to get rather bad for some people in the mean time."

"That's noble of you, but there isn't a lot that one person can do to change the whole world. People have tried for centuries. Sure, some make a difference, an impact, but in the end, the world stays the same."

I shook my head at that, and pushed away the blonde hair that fell into my face. "Maybe one person can't do everything alone, but every revolution needs a rebel, every fire needs a spark, and every disaster needs a catalyst. I plan to be all three."