Ryena point of view
The days bled into each other like a wound that refused to close.
I lost track of time—maybe that was the point. In a place like this, clocks didn't matter. What mattered was who you were when the lights went out. And I was nothing. Less than nothing.
The beatings weren't daily—but they were frequent enough that my body carried reminders. A bruise on my ribs that turned yellow-green. A split lip that throbbed for days. One morning, I woke to find my shoes missing. Another day, someone pissed on my pillow while I was in the mess hall.
Sometimes I wondered if the guards saw it all and simply chose not to care. Who am i kidding? This is prison afterall...No one will care, we are just like a trash to them. Worth of nothing but beating.
I remember the day I almost gave up. I wanted to end everything, so that I will be able to rest forever, no more pain, no more beating, no more humiliation. It's just me sleeping peacefully. But someone stopped me, the only person who think that I'm innocent the only person who gave me life to this hell.
It was a Tuesday. Rain pelted the cell windows like it wanted in, like it wanted to drown us all. The gray outside looked just like the walls around me—cold, empty, and endless just like me.
Carla and her pack cornered me in the showers.
No cameras there. No guards. I could only pray silently.
They yanked the towel from my body, laughter ringing off the tiles like gunshots.
"Show us what a mommy-killer looks like naked," Carla sneered, pressing her soapy palm against my chest. I stumbled back, hitting the cold, wet wall.
"You're not so special now, huh?" someone else hissed.
I tried to push past them, but a knee rammed into my stomach, folding me over with a gasp.
"Where's your pretty boyfriend now?" Carla asked, grabbing my hair and slamming my head lightly against the wall—once, twice. Not hard enough to kill. Just hard enough to humiliate.
I curled into myself, arms trembling, ears ringing.
"Why im being punished like this" I cried silently," I didn't do anything wrong"
That night, I didn't eat.
I didn't move.
I just stared at the sink in my cell. The rusted pipe below it had a jagged edge—broken, sharp. My eyes kept going back to it like it was whispering to me.
I climbed down from the top bunk after lights out. The air was so still it felt like death was waiting just outside the bars.
I knelt beside the sink.
I reached for the pipe.
And I froze.
Tears ran down my face in silence, but not from fear—because I felt nothing. That was the worst part. Not the pain, not the shame, not the loneliness. The nothingness.
And then—
A voice sliced through it all.
"Don't," Hili said. She didn't yell. She didn't run to me. She just stood there, outside my cell, gripping the bars like they were the only thing keeping her tethered to earth.
"How did you—" I choked.
"I watch. You're loud when you're silent." Her voice was flat, but her eyes weren't. They were blazing. Angry. Not at me—at the world that made me feel like this.
"I can't do this," I whispered, collapsing onto the floor, the sharp edge still inches from my palm. "I can't be here anymore. I'm so tired."
Hili knelt, forehead against the bars.
"You think I didn't have those nights too?" she asked. "You think I didn't look at the ceiling and wonder if I'd ever breathe real air again? If I mattered? If my name even meant anything? I was just like you when I was first came here, Too broken too speak"
I sobbed, my hands gripping the fabric of my pants so tightly my knuckles turned white.
"But you're not going to die here," she growled. "You're going to survive. And you're going to make every bastard who hurt you wish they hadn't."
I looked up at her, trembling. "Why do you care?"
She hesitated.
Then shrugged. "You reminded me of someone."
That night, she didn't leave. She sat against my cell door until morning, humming something low and sweet and tragic.
After that, she never let me fall too far.
She made me do pushups beside her. She taught me how to fight dirty—like how to use a sock full of soap bars as a weapon, how to scream bloody murder to draw attention if I needed a guard, how to turn pain into a weapon.
She made me recite poetry from torn books in the library just so I remembered I had a voice.
"Read it like you're trying to seduce the sun," she'd say.
And I did.
Sometimes, I saw her watching me—not just the bruises healing on my skin, but the way my posture changed. The way I began to glare back. How my voice no longer cracked when I spoke.
One night, weeks after I nearly ended it, I found a small paper crane folded on my pillow.
It was made from a ripped-out page of the prison rulebook. Across one wing, scrawled in black pen, were the words:
"You're still breathing. That means you've still got teeth."
I pressed it to my chest and cried again—but this time, it wasn't hopeless. It was a storm breaking.
After that, I roared.
I roared when I got into a fistfight with Carla and left her with a bloody nose. I roared when I won a game of chess in front of a crowd, beating one of the block's most feared inmates. I roared every time I walked past the showers and no one dared look at me sideways anymore.
"You're not soft anymore," Hili said one afternoon, tossing a fruit cup into my lap. "You're steel wrapped in velvet."
And she smiled like she was proud.
It wasn't just survival now.
It was rebirth.
I was someone else now.
And hell had made me beautiful.