In the dark of the stone dungeon, bleached and dry sunlight breached only one area. The tips of Diana's fingers. She could so slightly feel the warmth on her badly mangled and ripped fingernails. Blood edged her once clean hands. It had infiltrated every dip and crevice of them. 

Chemical burns crimped her sweat-dampened skin.

She'd sat with a dark cloth blinding her, only telling time by the heat that waned and returned by pricking her fingers.

He wrenched her hair back, she could smell the grimy alcohol on his unwashed breath.

Her stomach growled, her hunger no longer satiated with eating her internal organs.

He bellowed, even with the cloth, Daian could feel his blaze-filled spit against her cheeks. "What do you know about project Whitehall?" She stayed quiet.

Trying to breathe through the pain of having her hair follicles stretched to their limit. She would not speak, she would not betray her country. Diana knew her role, she had prepared for anything, they would not- could not make her utter a single word. 

"If you won't tell us willingly, I'll force it out of you."

Diana's ears pricked at the sound of dragging feet, playing with metal.

A bucket.

A rag.

The water was freezing as it inundated her, like arctic waves. It rushed and soaked through the towel quickly. Diana tried to hold her breath and keep calm but another flare of pain caught her off guard.

Her wrists shook against the ropes that held her to the chair.

They mumbled something in a language she didn't understand. It wasn't Chechen.

They lifted the towel and Diana spat with a water and sweat drenched frame , "Fuck you." There was silence for a moment, spinning her heart into an uncontrollable and booming mess.

That was the problem with silence, something always had to break it. To fill the air with noise. And it was never something good.

She couldn't see him, only feel his calloused fingers against her bloody chin. The man held her mouth open.

The water was like glass shards as it buried her. They poured the water down her throat, drowning her from that wooden chair.

Bile churned hot in her throat, clawing at the bony interior. Choking her from the inside.

She felt like screaming but that would only give them a weakness to exploit. Diana had learned very quickly that to show weakness was to die. Scream underwater, scream silent.

To show pain was to sign your own death certificate.

In that moment, as the water ran down to the tips of her pink alveoli Diana thought of death. As she often did in the dark. She thought of the unmarked grave they'd throw her limp body into. How the worms and bugs would eat her bony flesh and burrow holes in it.

"This is just the beginning, CIA agent Diana Winters." His cigarette-soaked breath pressed up against her as he murmured in a tone like death himself. 

The first things Diana noticed as she awoke was the smell of vomit lingering in the air and the battering of her heart.

Everything was quiet, too quiet. Beyond her door was silent. The streets and homes beyond her window were still, reticent.

The only sound she could hear was her own battering heart and rattling bones.

The bed briefly creaked as she rose, the imprints of her dream gnawed at her dark eyelids. Taunting her like a game that she had lost.

The keys jingled as she raised them from the blue bowl, but stopped when her palm wrapped around the cold metal.

The car rumbled on. It trembled beneath her exhausted frame. Diana flipped aimlessly through the channels as she drove, disjointed mixes of songs, voices and genres blared within the car.

She hadn't driven in years, taking downtrodden and rural roads.

Then, an angry booming voice caught her attention. It screamed at the top of its lungs, cracking and reverberating through the car. She couldn't hear her red heart, she couldn't hear herself.

Staying on the channel, Diana let it play. Slapping her palms against the leather of the steering wheel. Letting the music blare with rage and fury.

She began to scream alongside it. And in that moment Diana tried to scream until her body cracked and exploded. Finally she could feel something in her fingertips that didn't feel like it was pricking blood.

She hadn't even felt herself cry. Tears streamed down her face as the world blurred around her. Heavy metal blared in her bones, shaking the car. Even then however, even as her muscles and sinew vibrated with the pulse of the song, the fading had not disappeared. The fog which obscured the details of the world around her, the same fog which had taken up space and dug itself into every crevice of her brain still lingered wordlessly making everything around her seem unreal. As though the world might crumble beneath her and she might simply not take notice. 

Zooming past the carmine stop signs and a darkened Diana didn't let up on her screaming alongside the song. Even as it scorched and mangled her dry throat.

For a moment, as the tears poured, Diana felt as if she was outside of her body. Like she could see herself, driving, zooming through the blackened roads.

There were no bones inside of her frail frame, only the light of air. She'd almost closed her eyes and watched herself from the heavens above. Her body felt hot, like vermillion heat wound around her frame.

Perhaps then, she could feel the air as it rushed over her skin.

But then it all fell away as Diana stepped on the brakes. The car skidded and halted with malicious speed.

Because, standing before her was Anzor. With a chest that rose and fell. He stood, strong and straight, just like the last time she'd seen him. He had stood over her with a blood encrusted knife of her own. One that he had often slipped against her open skin.

There was a golden hue to his shadowy face. A brush of light wind ruffled his dark hair. His wrinkled face was wrought into a smirk, as if he'd known she'd stop for him. He gazed towards her with an observing stare.

Trying to find any weaknesses that he, Vakha, Duvakha or Shamil had not wrung from her heart.

Perhaps she should've kept driving.

Part of Diana knew that there was no Anzor before her. And yet, she kept the car idling. She'd seen his dead face, filled with his own red blood. She'd seen his chest that did not rise nor fall.

And then, just as he had miraculously risen, Diana watched with wide eyes as heavy metal shook her bones, how he melted into the road beneath his feet.

First his feet softened beneath the onyx asphalt. Soon enough it was his knees, his chest, his arms and head. As though he didn't notice his sinking, Anzor bore holes towards her, his dark eyes made her shrivel beneath him. And then all that was left of him was a minute puddle. But soon enough that faded too.

Perhaps bodies of her family would too drift into nothingness like hers felt like it had. Like Anzor's had.

Diana ran over the puddle where Anzor laid.