He was a raw nerve with a name he barely remembered.

Bob. Was that right?

Did it matter?

The world was pain—layered and sharpened and precise. Not the messy kind. No, this was surgical. Engineered. Beautiful in the way a vivisection is beautiful, if you’re the one holding the knife.

He wasn’t.

He was on the table.

Or the floor.

Or hanging by his wrists again, arms dead from the elbows down. The room changed, but the agony never did. It just adapted.

The textures under his skin were maddening. He couldn’t take a step, a breath, a shiver without feeling it. Everything was wrong. The walls scraped his shoulders with soft velvet that made his skin crawl. The floor changed beneath his knees every few hours—one hour it was fine salt that lodged in every cut, the next it was spiked metal mesh that hissed with heat. One tile felt like a tongue. Another like bone.

And they made him crawl.

Taste was a weapon, too. They dripped it onto his tongue with eyedroppers, injected it into his IV. Chemical cocktails engineered to trick his senses. Sometimes it was syrupy sweet, so thick it choked him, followed by sudden bitterness that punched the back of his throat until he gagged. Other times, they made him taste wrongness: rubber, rot, rust, bile.

They made him eat. Not food—never food—but substance. Globs of textured mush flavored like vomit or sugar or both, so he couldn’t stop retching long enough to know what was worse.

The worst was the fruit.

It tasted like memory. Like her. Apples. The kind she used to carry in her pocket. She’d offered him one once—red, polished, bright. He never ate it. Just stared. Afraid it was a trick. Afraid he’d ruin something so kind.

They replicated that taste exactly.

Then laced it with blood.

He vomited for hours.

And the heat—

God, the heat was intentional.

They called it temperature play, like it was a game. It wasn’t. They cooked him from the outside in. Heat lamps seared patches of skin until it blistered. Then they’d shut them off, throw him into ice water, shock his nervous system so hard he seized. The cycle repeated. Hot, cold, hot, cold—again, again—until he couldn’t tell which burned more.

Once, they pressed heated metal against his spine while fans blew freezing air across his front. His body twitched, confused by the signal, unsure if he should scream or freeze or die.

And then—the water.

They strapped him again. Always the same table. He could count the grooves with his spine. The cloth. The pouring. The drowning.

He didn’t fight anymore. He didn’t flail. He just waited.

The silence after each session felt like betrayal. He wanted the pain to end, but the quiet—God, the quiet meant it would start again soon.

And it did.

Sometimes, they played her voice between tortures. Soft. Loving. Laced with lies.

But he knew her.

{{user}} was fire and silk. Broken things, made whole again. A Black Widow turned protector. A white knight with blood on her hands and gentleness in her soul. They could fake her voice, but not her faith.

She had told him once, in a whisper too soft to be real, “I see you, Bob.”

And even now—even in this broken ruin of a man—he clung to that truth.

He’d never let them take her from him.

Even if they took everything else.

—

The explosion didn’t register as hope at first.

Just another sound. Another light. Another shock to his fraying system.

But then came the voice.

Firm. Familiar.

A command, barked in Russian.

Then hands—real ones, not latex, not steel—cupped his face.

“Bob.” Her voice cracked.

No speaker. No filter. No manipulation.

Just her.

He whimpered. A soft, choking sob, torn from the back of his throat like glass. His eyes wouldn’t open. Not all the way. Light still hurt.

But the smell—

Rain. Gun oil. Apples.

Her.

“Easy,” she murmured, pulling off his restraints like they were poison. “You’re safe now.”

She didn’t flinch from the burns. She didn’t gag from the smell. She just held him, cradled his soaked body against hers like he wasn’t a thing anymore.