@paramounticebound
His sheets will be of the finest thread count cotton, fringed in milk white silk. The automatic blood and nervous system regulator program maintained by the services of the highest adaptive technology. She would not lose her latest venture to less than the very best that modern science could procure.
She awaits his awakening, somewhat impatient. Nails drumming, a steady if somewhat accelerated pace to the marble arm of her seat.
Each exhibit she entertained deserved a hall of it’s very own. His was crafted, wrought and detailed in immaculate marble.
How lovely the product of birth, even a second one. To watch his moth lashes flutter, break into the white light of his cage…why it quite stilled her breath!
He was worth every penny.
He doesn’t dream. That’s the catalyst of sleeping in ice. The frost grants immortality, but it never allows the illusion of living. Even when wires and monitors assist the slumbering soul, reveries are absent. There’s a distinct hole where his dreams should be, and it’s colder than the space between the stars, the space between twitching fingers.
Yes– he’s alive, and he’s awake. Slowly, painfully, every single nerve screaming in time with each breath. There’s something wrong, something that makes him nauseous. He hadn’t expected a rebirth to make him want to wither away. Bright, white lights flood fragile eyes, reminding him of the very laboratories that stole his blood and his youth. The ache continues, digging claws in deep, soaking into muscle and marrow alike. Lungs still capture oxygen, the heart still beats. The greatest bodily betrayal is that he’ll live in sickly sweet agony.
And she, a woman who offers herself as a queen, leering at him as a wolf might a lamb. She grants him no respite, and he finds the ache around his spine a warning. Primal and rooted somewhere deep inside, within crafted veins and inherited savagery, reptilian fear seeps into him. Solitary: he feels alone. Just him and her and she and he, the woman watching him through the glass.
Khan will not be bested.
“Where am I? When am I?”
Saliva builds behind blissfully smiling lips. Novelty breeds a kind of ravenous hunger, a hyper hybrid of its more generically acceptable twin. She wakes anew with her charges, each and every time. Until they at last dull or disappoint. And then she is but bodily function, boredom wreathed and wasted away. Preparing for the next. And the next after that.
For each, in their time, she lives and breathes. Pure intoxication. As long as they...entertain. The best are those that refuse. Challenge her creativity to culture a means of extorting said entertainment. She does so hope he refuses. She is in need of a good...stretching of her immoral imagination.
“Somewhere.”
She rises, fluid. Approaching, the soft click of well maintained heels a distinct sting in the silence of their empty arena.
“Sometime.”
Bringing herself all but flush to the invisible casement encircling her caught quarry, her eyes slick over him like an auctioneer. Asking quite suddenly and cordially, “Do you require something to drink? I imagine your esophagus feels a mite as if it were raked over eternally with shards of dry ice.”
