flutiebear:

Solitary confinement impacts everyone differently, but from what I’ve researched, some effects are more common than others. One is an inability to regulate your attention span, whether its an inability to concentrate or a tendency toward obsession. Isolation panic is another — although I already touched on that in The First Night. Finally, there’s the inability to control your emotions and a loss of the sense of self, which I’ve started trying to poke at here.

Even in Act I, Carver is a man defined by his empty spaces: a lack of his twin, a lack of purpose, a lack of understanding and maturity. But what happens when you stick him in a vacuum, so that all this man of empty spaces has to define himself is more empty space? That’s what I’m hoping to find out.

Previous drabble: Blue Sky Day

***

“I’m back,” he says to the empty cell. “And I found something.”

Carver sits on the bed that isn’t a bed and withdraws the leaf from his sock. He lays the flat, broad blade against his legs like a book to be read, and regards it curiously—waiting, perhaps, or just collecting his thoughts. In here, they amount to the same thing.

“I don’t know.” He shrugs. “Maybe someone left it there on purpose?”

Idly he traces the long, thin veins with his forefinger, but no foul magic springs forth from its empty channels, no poisons or Taints or other insidious threats.   

“Well, at first I thought it might be—them,“ he says, lowering his voice to a whisper and furtively glancing toward the wall where sometimes appears the door, the exit that isn’t an exit. Then he straightens his back, sucks in a deep breath and smooths the leaf against his knees. “But now I’m not so sure. It could be from Mother, or, or—“

Carver wants to say her name—he tries to—but his tongue sticks on the first vowel and refuses to move further. Just as well. There’s hope, and then there’s just torturing himself. “Moira,” he says instead.

His finger is so large against the leaf, so fleshy and substantial. It seems strange that it should still retain so many callouses, obsolete as they are here—they’re just reminders that this body once belonged to another man, a lifetime ago.

Then his breath catches in his throat. His finger stops its restless journey.

“Don’t joke like that,” he mutters. “You know Garrett’s been made Tranquil.”

He frowns.

“He might as well be. Who knows what I’ve been saying in here in my sleep?”

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AUGHAUGHAGUH.

Carver.

I can’t, flutie, I just can’t.