11. JESTER
JESTER
Those tiny pink plastic earbuds.
They sat nestled inside the delicate shell of her ears like two parasitic ticks, drowning out me.
I was screaming through the iron bars, my vocal cords tearing, a beautiful, bloody rasp scraping against the back of my throat, and she was just...
shifting her weight from one foot to the other, humming a sickeningly sweet little tune, pushing that miserable rubber squeegee across the wet concrete.
She couldn't hear a single word I said.
Bluetooth.
The word tasted like battery acid and static electricity in my mouth.
A vile, invisible plague. A digital wall erected right between my teeth and her eardrums. My hands pulled against my chains so hard the iron bit into my palms, but I couldn't even feel it.
The fury was a living, breathing reptile in my chest, clawing its way up my esophagus.
How did the warden allow this? Where was the discipline?
Where was the rigid, unyielding protocol of a maximum-security containment level?
This was a prison! It was a place where every sigh was supposed to echo, where every rattle of my chains was supposed to make her pretty little shoulders flinch.
But no. The brass let their staff slip their pocket-sized screens through the checkpoint, allowing the outside world to leak into my sanctuary. If she didn't have that flashing little rectangle hidden in her uniform pocket, she’d have nothing to listen to… but me.
"Look at me!"
She didn't even blink. She just dipped her mop into the bucket, the gray water splashing against the plastic rim.
A tiny strand of dark hair had fallen out of her neat clip, framing her sweet face.
She looked so soft, so small. A fragile little doll operating on a completely different radio tower.
She reached up, her blue-gloved finger gently tapping the side of her right ear—adjusting the volume, perhaps? Or switching to the next track?
The sheer, casual indifference of the gesture felt like a blade twisting directly into my liver.
She was actively shutting me out of her head.
I began to writhe. The rage wasn't just a thought anymore; it was a physical seizure, a violent, chaotic dance that overtook my limbs.
I threw my back against the stone wall, the heavy chains rattling a frantic, discordant melody.
Clang. Clang. Clang. I dragged my wrists against the iron cuffs until the skin split, weeping a dark, beautiful red down my forearms, but the pain was nothing compared to the white-hot humiliation of her silence.
I was a storm trapped in a box, a hurricane of teeth and broken glass, and she was the calm, sterile eye of a needle, completely untouched.
She finished the floor. She didn't look at the walls.
She didn't look at the bars. She stripped her gloves with that familiar snap, packed her bins, and walked toward the heavy threshold.
For a fraction of a second—just a heartbeat—her gaze drifted toward my cell.
I froze, my chest heaving, my bloody fingers frozen against the stone floor.
Waiting.
But her eyes were empty. She wasn't looking at me. She was looking through me, her mind miles away, buried in whatever digital garbage was pumping through those pink plastic ticks.
The iron door screamed shut behind her, the lock turning with a final, definitive clack.
She was gone.
The tier plunged back into its thick, pressurized silence. The air felt heavy, stagnant, smelling faintly of the industrial lavender soap she had used to erase my presence.
And then, the manic energy drained out of my muscles all at once, leaving my limbs heavy and cold. The chaotic, trembling rhythm of my breath smoothed out, slowing down, down, down, until it was nothing more than a shallow, ghostly rattle.
I went eerily still.
I lay there on the cold stone floor, my cheek pressed against the rough, damp surface, staring at the empty space where her bucket had just been. The storm in my brain condensed from a wild, scattered explosion into a single, razor-sharp point of pure light.
"My clever, wicked little doll."
She thought she could protect herself with technology. She thought she could build a digital fortress to keep my voice out of her pristine, orderly mind. She thought she could come down into the dark, touch my art, and leave with her soul completely intact.
How beautifully naive.
A slow, terrifying grin stretched across my face, cracking the dried blood on my lips. The taste of copper was warm and familiar. I liked the taste.
I wanted her to taste it, too.
I didn't just want her to listen to me anymore.
I wanted to pull those tiny pink beans out of her ears with my own teeth, discarding them like plastic trash, until there was nothing left for her to hear but the sound of my breath against her skin.
I wanted to break her apart. Not out of malice—oh, no, never malice—but out of a deep, burning necessity.
I wanted to peel back that calm, practical exterior piece by piece, layer by layer, until I found the raw, screaming nerve underneath.
I wanted to punish her for today. I wanted to see her sweet, pretty face twisted in absolute focus, her chest heaving, her eyes wide and brimming with tears as she finally, truly understood who held her strings.
She wouldn't be looking at a screen then.
She wouldn't be humming someone else's tune.
It takes two to dance, sweetface, but only one to set the trap. You think you hold the rules down here, but I’m the one holding all the wild cards.