Occasionally he asked his passing caretakers for the time, but most avoided answering him beyond necessity. Sometimes they answered 'two-fifteen' or 'four thirty' but never offered AM or PM. Truthfully, Ochre wasn't certain when time gained such significance to him. Maybe it never did, and he only used it as a means to prove to himself how out of touch he was with the real world. Sometimes he thought it meant something, like he had somehow leveraged an upper hand against Cyllene and her bizarre arrangement, but that momentary and frivolous triumph felt so fleeting.
So he pleaded with himself to stick to his own time schedules - to declare day as his awake hours and night as his sleep hours, and he tried to keep to the schedule of journaling before sleep. But with more and more hours added to his frazzled and bored mind, he did nothing more than journal relentlessly when awake. He broke his own rules since his own opinions never mattered.
And he talked to himself, since most others wouldn't.
Domeykite's visit gave him burgeoning hope, but even that felt like a feverdream when trapped behind energy-draining bars in a perpetually dim cavern. When he heard footsteps, he hoped they belonged to the youth that visited him with a sub sandwich and conversation that tasted better than ambrosia. But he hadn't returned since, and Ochre was starting to wonder if the lieutenant might turn up in these very cells, or if they did away with him after finding out what he shared in such a confined space. And so Ochre sat patiently on his hard cot, counting his iteration of seconds in his head while weary eyes looked out and peered into the darkness following the hallway.
Ultimately, he never discerned anything from his predicament.
But somewhere down that hall, footsteps sounded. His heart always raced to greet them. The corrupt sat at attention, neck craned, hands idly fidgeting into some acceptable Negaverse at-attention stance that might prove acceptable for some conversation. And most importantly, he waited as patiently as he could, though he wanted greatly to cling to the bars and peer out toward that black mass.
wuthering gee
sorry this took so long!
