Escape from Ironheart (IC)

[The_Snark]

Mar

She took the shirt, using it to scrub up some of the water. It did help, a little, although once it was wet it didn't do much more than move the water around a little. She wrung the shirt out over the bucket, staining it faintly with red. And it wouldn't help her, because she'd already spilled. It didn't matter if she cleaned it up afterwards. She'd messed up and spilled, and talked to someone, and—

She shivered harder, experience keeping her from crying, and pushed some of the water over towards the man, sweeping it through the cell bars. "It's dirty..." she whispered, though that was obvious. She wasn't supposed to give him any water, not even dirty water, but she'd done so much wrong already that it didn't matter. Besides, he was cold because he'd given her the shirt, and it would be wet when she gave it back. She should give him something for being that nice. That couldn't be very wrong. Except it was, because Daddy had said she wasn't supposed to do it...

"I'm not supposed to," she muttered, wringing out the shirt over the bucket again. It didn't matter, but she had to clean it up anyway, just to prove to herself that she could do one thing right. Maybe after she was punished, in a few days, Daddy would tell her she'd done that thing right. Besides, the longer she took cleaning up the longer it would be until she had to go see him. And she could talk to the man in the cell, too, even if she wasn't supposed to.

She wondered why he was here. He wasn't bad at all, he was nice. Wistfully, she wondered if giving her his shirt had been wrong. Maybe it was wrong to try to help her if she was being bad. Maybe he'd done something like that and that was why he was here... but she secretly liked him for it, even though she knew that was very bad, almost worse than anything she'd done today. She shivered convulsively, both from cold (the stone floor was cold and hard, especially through her wet dress) and fear.

But she spoke up anyway. "Why are you here?" she ventured in a timid whisper, looking up from her spot on the floor. "You're not mean, like—like a lot of the other men in cages..." She hunched and shivered again, trying not to remember some of them. A lot of them threw themselves against the bars, as if they wanted to hurt her themselves, but that wasn't really very bad, because most of the time she had done something to deserve it. She didn't really know why they were in cages... but he wasn't like the rest of them, anyway. Even she wasn't in a cage; what could he have done?