Suffering Builds Character

She woke up to the sound of the door, and unfolded her body, rolling over stiffly to find Bane stepping back inside. She sat up and hung her feet over the edge to put her boots back on as he set a plastic bag on his desk and approached her.
"Sidonie, you have two choices. They are quite simple. You may stay here, where you will have food and shelter, or you may go back to the city streets. It is entirely your choice. If you decide to leave, you have the option of coming back, but if you do, I cannot let you leave again," he explained. Sidonie stared up at him for a long moment, before looking away and chewing her bottom lip in thought. The decision was difficult. She could stay, where she would run the risk of running into more men like the three in the alley. She could decide to stay with these strangers in the middle of nowhere, and face the consequences of her actions, whatever they may be. Or, she could return to the streets, back to her life of starving and stealing. She could go back to what she was used to, as miserable as it was. After a long silence, she turned her eyes back up to the masked man.
"I want to go back," she said quietly, almost hesitantly. It was hard to decline the shelter, but she had no reason to trust she would be safe with these people.
"Are you sure that is what you want?" he asked. She spared a small nod. "Very well. I will have someone take you back to the city," he said, going back to the bag on his desk. He pulled something out of it, and when he turned back to her, she saw it was a jacket. It was a brown leather jacket with a wool lining on the inside, similar to the one hanging over the back of his desk chair. "I had this bought for you with winter setting in. You will need it. Come with me," he said, handing her the jacket and heading back toward the door. She slipped it on over her clothes and followed him outside where a van was waiting. Before she got in she turned toward Bane once more.
"If I did decide to come back, how would I even do that?" she asked.
"You won't be too far from our sight, Sidonie. Goodbye," he replied simply.

She watched as the van pulled away from the curb, the tail lights shining bright and red in the growing darkness. She was dropped off at the park, near the same exact bus stop she had made her bed the other night. She stared at the bench for a moment before sighing and stepping foot into the park. The night would be spent in a sheltered spot of the children's play area.
Wandering through city streets the next day, she discovered a pocket hidden on the inside of her coat, and a slight bulge in the pocket caught her attention. Reaching inside, she let out a small gasp when she found the bulge to be a rolled up sum of money. After going over the math carefully, she figured, if she rationed everything, it would feed her for about a month. A month was all she told herself she would need to get back on her feet as best she could.
That month passed, and with it, so did the remnants of warmth in the air. She had managed to put on a small bit of weight in that month, and at least she looked somewhat healthier. Now, all she had to worry about was keeping it on. The jacket she had received from the intimidating masked man did wonders. Of course, she was still cold, but not nearly as miserable and exposed as she would have been without it. She made it a point to keep the gunshot wound as clean as she could, to keep it from getting infected. When she cut the stitches out, in the bathroom of some fast food restaurant, she sighed. There would always be an ugly little scar there. Round, rigid, lighter in color than the rest of her skin. A reminder of what could have happened to her.
It could have been her way out of her misery. After whatever terrors those three men had in store for her, she would probably have been lying dead in that alley, finally free from the pathetic existence she lived. Not a day went by that she didn't think of the offer Bane had given her. That she could go back to the old warehouse if she wanted to. But she didn't see it as an option. She had no reason to trust those men. She knew whatever they were doing was entirely illegal. She knew just by looking at the few she saw, and Barsad and Bane, that there was no sane person to think them the good guys. Whatever they were running meant destruction and absolute fear for anyone. There had to have been more men than that single warehouse could hold. The other men were probably stationed elsewhere, planning and plotting something cold and brilliant.
Two months went by, and Sidonie was growing more miserable every day. She took to blaming Barsad for saving her in the first place. If Barsad had just left her there, she would never know she could have had a place to go. A place where she would have food and shelter and clean clothes. But she was a coward. She was afraid of that change. This life, the life of wandering streets and sleeping in parks and bus stops, stealing scraps and money, was a life she had known for seven fucking years, and changing her life so suddenly was much too nerve wracking for her to face. She didn't want to know what would happen if she decided to go back. These were dangerous men, and she knew perfectly well what a dangerous man could do to such a pathetic being. She didn't want to have shelter if it meant sacrificing herself to have it.
She was losing what was left of her mind to her pain and misery by the end of the third month. She had some strength before she was given the choice, but every day that choice grew like a tumor in her mind, and she knew it was her breaking point. She had given up her sanity long ago, and giving that up made room for a few simple words to boil in her mind, covering it like thick black tar. That choice and her own cowardice, her inability to take a chance at a better life, her insanity was breaking her. She knew she wasn't sane. No one comes out of the life she did a sane person. Not someone as weak as she had been.
One simple choice managed to fester in her mind, open ancient parts of herself that she had closed off for her own protection. She didn't know how it happened. If she could get one coherent thought out of her screaming mind, that was it. She had no idea how the transition from that choice to the horrors of her life took place, but she couldn't take it anymore. She had never been in such a state of panic and misery in her life, and she couldn't do it. It was physically painful at that point.
She was sitting on the railing of the bridge she had spent so many days looking over and imagining throwing herself off of. She sat staring at the icy cold water, and had been for the last hour. After all the unbearable screaming in her mind, she found the core of her misery. Hope. It had always been hope. It was hope when she was a little girl, it was hope when she finally escaped, and it was the hope Bane had given her. It was the cause of her insanity, she knew that as she looked past her dangling legs. Hope was such a simple word, such a simple thing to those who didn't know despair. But the truth was, hope could ruin everything a person is.
Her grip on the railing was loosening as she stared blankly down at the water. She couldn't feel the numbing cold of winter. She couldn't feel anything anymore. Three months was all it took to finally kill the girl. But just as she was about to let go, she was pulled forcefully back over the railing, back to the hard concrete ground. Her blue eyes turned up to the force that pulled her back, and met a pair of familiar lazy blue eyes. It was Barsad, standing over her as she pulled herself up to sit, dazed by the interference.
"What are you doing?" he asked, his accented voice worried as he pulled her up and blocked her path back to the ledge. She looked around for a moment, and Barsad noticed how dead she looked. When her eyes fell back on him, she suddenly became furious.
"It's your fault," she said, voice too calm for her expression. "It's your fault. It's your fault! This is your fault! This is your fault!" her voice rose to painful levels of volume, the single phrase leaving her lips repetitively as she began shoving and punching Barsad in the chest. His brows furrowed and the only thing written on his face was concern. The girl he met three months ago was a mess, but this was something else entirely. After recovering from his immediate shock, he began trying to calm her down. He was stronger than she was, and used his strength to stop her feeble attack on him and pulled her to his chest, trying to shush the struggling girl. She kept screaming, kept struggling until she just broke down, sobbing and clinging to Barsad like a broken child.
"You're going to come back to the warehouse," Barsad said, rubbing her back softly. He got her into the backseat of the van he had parked against the curb, and began to drive back to the warehouse. Sidonie didn't move the entire time.