Our Father, Who Art In Prison; Hugo Be Thy Name

[Hugo Montegue]

Unknown Imperial Holding Facility

The light was bright. They did that on purpose: plunge you into numbing darkness so your vision could adjust to cope with just the few stray photons that bounced around the featureless walls, only to slam high-intensity light on you without a moment's warning, battering down your faculties. The lighting pattern was random; or rather, it was on a long enough loop to make trying to predict when the next surge would occur all but impossible. You had to grab sleep where you could get it, storing up your tiredness for the next reign of blackness so that you might somehow be able to recharge the inverse solar batteries that humanoids seemed to run on. Sometimes, you'd manage to find a decent corner where you could curl up face-down: enough exhaustion might let you sleep into the next light assault, if you were lucky.

Hugo let out a breath of an ironic laugh through his dry, cracked lips. If I was lucky, I wouldn't be in here.

Rolling over - the pressure of his body against the unpadded bunk was setting off too many of the pain receptors on his battered and bruised body for him to ignore any longer - he winced against the glowing ceiling and scratched at the one patch of chest that wasn't aching. Holding his other arm above his face, he tried to peer around the shadowed sillhouette of his fingers, so that he might identify the source of the light and know the face - or at least the form - of his current tormentor. The pristine whiteness of the ceiling stared back at him, the perfectly uniform surface giving away nothing. Hugo wanted to scream, shout; leap up and smash the ceiling until the darkness returned. Unfortunately, his voice had long since failed him, and his leaden limbs wouldn't let him spur them into life. Frak you, he hissed weakly inside his mind; even his mental efforts at retaliation seemed to be failing. And frak your frelling mystery light.

Vaguely, Hugo percieved the distant rumbling of movement through the icy durasteel that carpetted the floor of his cell. The clanking echoes of booted feet against the grating outside vibrated all around him, ringing in his ears. With a groan, Hugo pushed himself off the bed, crawling to the center of the room and rising up on his knees, fingers interlaced behind his head. He'd been here so long that even the sweet taste of defiance wasn't enough to outweigh the pain of the beatings he'd suffer as a result.

A thought floated through his mind. How long have I been here? With the random lighting fluxuations, his body clock was in disarray. It had been days, certainly. Weeks? Probably. Months? There he couldn't be sure. His captors certainly knew what they were doing when it came to throwing a captive off-balance. Hugo barely knew which way was up; everything else in his mind was exponenially more vague. He wished they'd just ask him some straight questions - things he could give them good enough answers to so they'd leave him in peace - but everything was cryptic, complex; their questions had layers that you needed to peel away before you even had a clue what they were really asking.

For a fleeting moment, he wondered how his boys - Vittore and Cambrio - were coping. They'd be getting on with their lives, hopefully: he hadn't told them where he was going, and judging from his captors he doubted they'd have left much of a trail to be followed. He panicked at the prospect of them blundering after him, and landing in the same trap he'd stumbled into. They were well trained, but not that well trained. Don't risk it, boys, he silently pleaded; force of will, or will of Force? Don't risk yourselves for me.

The door to his cell retracted, clanking its way into the framework of the steel prison in which he was caged. The brightness of the light cast her features into sharp relief, making her already menacing face all the more intimidating. From beneath those shadowed, scowling brows she stared out with those freakishly radient icy blues.

Her gaze swept across him. A shiver shot down his spine. Oh, shit, his mind muttered, in a small, trembling voice. She seemed to sense his panic. Somehow, the radiant evil in her features seemed to become more intense. Forget what I said. Someone get me the hell out of here.

The door dropped closed, a mighty clunk ringing out through the walls as the locking mechanism slid back into place, trapping her and him in here, together. Alone.

Please?

[R. S. Esalis]

This one had not necessarily been intended for breaking or any sort of long-term torture, but Esalis had taken out her anger at having lost many of her underlings in the hunt for the Lupine Jedi, Loklorien s'Ilancy. Arya, Mili, Orem, and worst of all Karrnage. That Lupine had dared to take the Colonel from under very nose! And worst of all, she'd been successful. It was a point of extreme soreness to even dwell upon. And all of her rages and frustrations had been placed upon the poor soul who now found himself in her keep.

Hugo Montegue.

He was a hunter of sorts, and while not normally one that she'd bother concerning herself with, a thought had begun to form in the back of her mind that this one might prove useful.

But, before all of that he needed to be stripped to the bone, bared raw before her eyes. And then, at his deepest feeling of loss, she was to rebuild him. In his previous life he had been nothing, but under her careful and guiding hand, he would be the one to bring all of her desires. Though he did not know it yet, she would give him back a life of meaning and purpose. And so she had kept him, neglecting to put her name to his release papers. She made sure that he'd been subject to the more cruel forms of mentally degrading tactics.

And when the door opened to allow her entry into his cell, she saw the fruits of her labors made manifest in his eyes. His fear. His desperation. It was such a wonderful thing to see.

With barely a motion to betray her thoughts, the Director of Imperial Intelligence clasped her hands at the small of her back, looking down at her new toy. Her new tool.

Her blue eyes narrowed to slits.

"Get up."

Her words weren't harsh, but there was without a doubt coldness to them.

"You are going to be coming with me."

[Hugo Montegue]

Hugo's muscles tensed; at least, they did the best approximation that their energy-drained and nutrient-deprived state would allow. They'd played this game before; stand the prisoner, so that he hits the ground harder when you crack him across the gut - or the back; or the head - with a stun baton. The guards were outside however, which brightened his odds slightly, particularly since she didn't seem to be armed with one of the more obvious prisoner discipline weapons. Of course, she could be here to kill him; she could want the grim satisfaction of watching his dead body slump to the floor.

Hell, his mind hissed, It can't get much worse than this.

Slowly, weakly, he pushed himself up off the floor. As he rose to his feet his legs trembled, barely able to hold him aloft. That ruled out any illusions of a bid for freedom; slumping onto his guards as the last few shreds of his energy reserves ran out didn't really seem like an effective way of subduing them. Willing his body to pause, he somehow managed to find a poise that didn't threaten to deposit him back onto the ground. She hadn't instructed as such, but slowly he unlaced his fingers from behind his head, dropping them carefully to his sides. She didn't seem to mind; he wondered if perhaps it would be better if she did: maybe she'd look away from him in disgust, and spare him from those eyes for a few instants.

For a moment, he considered being self-conscious about his state of dress. The prison garbs that they had provided weren't exactly designed to preserve his modesty. He doubted he was likely to display anything she hadn't seen before though. That wasn't a rhetorical turn of phrase either: it wouldn't surprise him if she already had an intimate knowledge of his full-body appearence; it had taken what he guessed was a few days before they'd even bothered to provide him with the scratchy, rough-spun tunic that he now wore.

He considered saying something - asking where they were going, perhaps - but even if he did still retain the mental agility to form a coherant sentence, his raw and parched throat wouldn't have let him. So, the obedient prisoner, he stood and waited for her to give the next instruction.

[R. S. Esalis]

She stood like some terrible statue, unmoving as her eyes traveled the length of his body. She took him in with her gaze. He looked much like what she expected; acted much like how she suspected. It made her proud of the work her men had done.

Hugo Montegue was a broken man, and R. S. Esalis knew that she was the one responsible.

The Director turned on her heel.

"Come with me."

[Hugo Montegue]

In an almost mindless stupour, Hugo stepped obediently forward, his slumped frame barely managing to remain errect. He followed her through the doorway, and out into the corridor; the guards that she had left waiting outside his cell fell into step behind him, their bootsteps clanking menacingly against the same grating that was slicing into his unshoed feet. A silver cloud existed there however: the Empire's hospitality thus far had numbed his body to almost all sensation.

As they walked, he considered asking where their destination was, but his experiences over the past indeterminate block of time had led him to realise that the answer was seldom pleasant, and usually surpassed even the worst his imagination could conjure up. Instead he remained in silence, staggering forward through the comparative blackness of the corridor as compared to his supernova-bright cell, struggling with his strained and fatigued eyes to pick out the black fabric and jet hair of Esalis' figure a mere few paces ahead.

Finally, from somewhere within him, he managed to muster a voice, small and cracked and broken though it might be. "Why -" he asked, starting his question with considerable effort, "- am I still alive?"

[R. S. Esalis]

She let his question hang in the air unanswered. Why he still graced the land of the living was largely on her own whim, but he needn't know that just yet.

Through bare corridors and angular hallways they went, their monotonous journey only broken in places by the lifts they used to gain access to higher levels. Yet, she was not so cruel as to parade him about in the upper levels in his current state, and the group stopped in the main staging area for departing criminals.

It was easy to tell that it was a room very rarely used.

A lone table occupied the far wall, and neatly pressed and folded on its' surface was a uniform. It would be his.

Esalis gestured to the clothing.

"Put those on."

[Hugo Montegue]

Finally free of the oppressive cell, Hugo began to feel his senses slowly returning. He felt fatigue prickling at the back of his eyes, and his body weighed him down, energy reserves totally drained. Part of him wished that his senses would stay in communicado: the messages that his body was insistantly trying to send to his brain were far from pleasant, and the cold sensation of the chilled and processed air biting at the insides of his thighs was somewhat unnerving. He'd worn similar clothing to his prison tunic before; being paraded around inside a hospital facility wearing nothing but the plastic equivalent was both uncomfortable, embarassing, and a little dangerous: particularly if any attractive nurses happened to be in the vacinity.

He risked a glance at his captor. Nope - no such dangers here.

Urging his aching, shakey muscles into motion once again, he staggered across the room to the table, and regarded the uniform with a mix of confusion and relief. For an instant, he considered pausing, waiting to see if she would leave the room or at least turn away and grant him a modicome of privacy, but common sense soon aborted that train of thought. Gripping at the rough fabric of his tunic, he dragged it over his head and let it drop onto the floor.

The feeling of clothes against his skin was strange. Though returning, his senses were still dull, and his skin in particular had grown ignorant to save itself from the irritation of the rough-woven prison garb. Like contact made with a sleeping limb, the much softer cloth of the uniform that she had provided felt vague and distant. And boots - his feet cloud still feel the pattern of the deck plates, even though his mind knew that there was nothing but sole beneath them.

He turned towards her - hair and face unkempt, expression haggared, eyes haunted - but feeling the tiniest shred of his humanity restored. His question bounced around in his head; Why am I still alive? There had to be a reason. More specifically, there had to be a reason why he was being granted this slight dignity. She wanted something from him, obviously. His eyes appraised her again, wondering what sort of 'services' she might have in mind. His brain attempted to conjure some sarcasm there, but the spark quickly died, along with the vague stirrings of defiance that accompanied it. Whatever she wanted, hopefully it would be over soon.