It was a simple thing, sleep, and when a person was really tired, sleep became a beast of its own, taking over and claiming this time as its own.

Faye and sleep were not the best of friends.

Now, lying on her back on the mattress (really not much more than a flat piece of foam), she could at least feel relief at the fact that Starfleet had generally humane prison cells. This was not the cold hard surface she had spent all that time on.

What she had perfected back then was the ideal way to sleep that provided as much comfort as could be gleaned from such a sparse situation. Arms above her head with her elbows bent at ninety-degrees, her forearms were draped atop each other, palms facing up. This created a perfect place to turn her head to the side slightly and rest the side of her face against her arm. It was the perfect little cushion, and thus one could (hypothetically) sleep. And this she had used for nine months.

Except that it hadn’t been nine months. Her imprisonment had lasted just over that but not every night of that she had slept. Or had been allowed to. The conditions varied greatly and that was the point, right? Keep your prisoner from having anything amounting to normalcy so that they were one step closer to breaking.

And that was just the light. There was the temperature. More often than not, cold. And there had never been a bed. Just a hard floor that in her hazy memories she wasn’t entirely sure if it had been stone or metal.

When she had escaped and had attempted to sleep in a bed again. And couldn’t. The mattress had been too soft and her messed up back couldn’t handle it. Instead she had resorted to sleeping on the carpeted floor of her quarters. After a week, she added a blanket. It took six whole month of physiotherapy before she could sleep in a normal bed again.

This brig cell was somewhere in the middle, and therein lay the mercy. And the danger. Her overactive mind had finally succumbed to rest but it was in the subconscious that memories swirled and mixed. there were Cardassians and Jem’Hadar and then Romulans too. Because of course there were. Pain mixed with terror mixed with the soft sounds of a comforting voice she couldn’t fully place but a part of her wanted to trust.

The nightmare raged on and her breaths became shaky, her murmurs troubled.

~Faye Calloway, Prisoner