Chapter Text
Being processed into Stillwater takes longer than Caitlyn expected.
They order her to strip and then they search her. She's given a new set of clothes to wear: ugly, uncomfortable underwear, scratchy socks, a loose wireless bra that doesn't fit her at all, a white tank top that's too short for her torso, and a grey shirt and pants to go over it all.
Once she's dressed, a guard tosses a pair of cheap slippers at her. Caitlyn puts them on, and then she's taken through another set of doors and into the next stages of processing.
She's fingerprinted and scanned and searched again before being brought to a small office. She sits down on an uncomfortable plastic chair while an irritated guard taps away at her keyboard and drinks coffee out of a cardboard cup.
The guard asks Caitlyn about any drug or alcohol use, and then asks again in a way clearly intended to get the true answer. Caitlyn answers truthfully: no drug use, an occasional glass of wine.
The guard moves on to Caitlyn's criminal history, which is nonexistent.
"Okay," the guard says, pausing to take another sip of coffee. "What's your highest level of education achieved?"
"Master's."
"In what?"
"Criminal justice."
The guard turns to stare at Caitlyn with a raised eyebrow.
Caitlyn stares back evenly. She's aware of the irony.
"Work history?" the guard asks finally.
"I was a senior detective with the PLED."
Silence.
The guard types on her keyboard, looks at Caitlyn again, and then looks back at the computer monitors. Her second monitor, to her right, is angled slightly and Caitlyn can see most of the screen. It had previously shown just a generic desktop, but now Caitlyn watches as the guard opens a web browser, types in Caitlyn's name, and then briefly scrolls through the news articles about her.
After a few minutes of silence, the guard turns back to Caitlyn. "Why are they putting you in genpop?"
"You'd have to ask them."
The guard shakes her head. "You know what they call a cop in prison?"
Caitlyn waits for the punchline.
"A dead cop," the guard says.
Caitlyn tries not to sigh. She fails.
Once she's been processed in, Caitlyn is given a clear plastic bag with her new items in it. A sheet, a tiny pillow, a blanket, and a scratchy towel. There's also a smaller plastic bag with a set of toiletries, all in flimsy packaging that can't be turned into a weapon.
Two guards escort Caitlyn through a few more sets of doors and deeper into the prison before passing her off to another guard to take her further.
The walls all thick concrete blocks, painted a drab grey. The floors are concrete and each door is heavy and reinforced (and drab grey.)
There are no windows.
The guard walks through the halls and Caitlyn follows. She keeps her head held high and her shoulders back. She refuses to slump, to hide.
She knows she has a distinctive posture. She stands like someone who went to what might colloquially be called 'finishing school', and what had technically been a private decorum tutor intended to prepare Caitlyn for a future in politics.
And now Caitlyn is here, in prison. She wonders idly what her decorum tutor would think of that.
She wonders what her mother would think of that.
Then she stops that line of thought before the grief can punch her in the stomach and wind its tendrils into her bones and organs and skull.
After a few minutes of walking through the monotonous cold halls, the guard takes her to another door where they have to stop and wait for it to electronically unlock. Then they're through, and into Caitlyn's new 'home'.
The cellblock isn't laid out quite like Caitlyn had expected.
She'd researched beforehand, of course. She'd wanted to know what to expect so she could best prepare herself, but there wasn't a lot of information readily available about the layout of Stillwater's cellblocks.
She still has the login to her PLED account, which she could've used to access Stillwater's floorplan, but that sort of thing is partially what got her here in the first place. So she didn't.
Caitlyn had instead been forced to use her imagination. She'd pictured a hallway lined with cells on either side and maybe a common area, called a pod, at one end. She now sees that she'd been wrong.
She and the guard have entered into a large common space. There are circular tables, presumably bolted to the floor, with matching benches for seating (also presumably bolted to the floor). Beyond the tables are a few sets of what Caitlyn would probably call 'living room' furniture - low armchairs, low sofas. All that furniture is configured into a few different setups: one looks like a conversation area, one seems more intended for quiet relaxation, and the third has a bunch of armchairs clustered in front of a small television set.
All of it is drab grey.
Surrounding the common area are cells. There's another level above this one, a second floor also lined with cells and the walkway open to the common area below. There's a metal railing lining that walkway, which makes it tough for Caitlyn to see those cells. But the heavy doors to the cells on this floor currently sit open, so Caitlyn can see inside.
To her relief, all of the cells look small. She knows that there are cellblocks in Stillwater where overcrowding has forced the occupancy in each cell to absurd numbers, and she's heard that there are some large rooms where up to twenty inmates sleep in bunk beds. She's been having literal nightmares about that scenario.
But these cells are tiny. As she glances around, it seems like only the slightly bigger cells hold two sets of bunk beds for four inmates total. The majority are small enough that only a single bunk bed fits, allowing for only two inmates per cell.
Then Caitlyn stops looking around, because the inmates scattered all throughout the common space have noticed her arrival and turned to stare.
"That's the cop," a young woman says loudly as Caitlyn follows the officer through the space, and a murmur rises.
Caitlyn tries not to sigh. She'd expected this. She knew that the news of her sentencing and arrival in Stillwater would spread through the prison, and that there would really be no hiding who she was, but she'd thought that she'd maybe get more than fifteen seconds of anonymity.
By the time the officer and Caitlyn reach the metal stairs leading up to the second-floor walkway, the murmur has risen to a clamour.
"You're up here," the guard says to Caitlyn as Caitlyn follows her up the steps. "It's your lucky day. This cellblock has an open bunk." She glances back at Caitlyn and shakes her head. "Can't believe they put you in genpop, though."
Caitlyn stays silent. When they reach the second floor, she follows the officer down the walkway past the doors of the open cells.
An inmate comes out of one of the cells through an open door and almost bumps into the officer. She steps back and then eyes Caitlyn as Caitlyn walks by.
Once Caitlyn and the guard have passed, Caitlyn glances behind her to see the inmate lean over the railing and call, "Vi, they're putting the cop in your cell."
There's a round of laughter and jeers from down below.
"No fucking way," someone calls, her voice clear and surprisingly melodic.
The officer ignores this and keeps walking. Caitlyn assumes she's used to all of this.
They're almost to the end of the hall when someone pops up on Caitlyn's left.
Caitlyn has always prided herself on her strong nerves and composure, but she flinches and nearly shrieks in shock, catching it at the last instant.
To Caitlyn's left is the railing. This walkway is about ten feet above the common area below.
And yet somehow this inmate has appeared on the wrong side of the railing, her hands on the rounded upper rail and her feet braced against the edge of the walkway.
"Martha, come on," the inmate pleads, looking at the guard and ignoring Caitlyn entirely. "I'm so good to you, aren't I? Don't do this to me. Don't put the cop in my cell."
The guard (presumably Martha) turns around and stares at the inmate. "Good to me? You're terrible to me, all you do is cause me trouble. I'm going grey before my time just because of you."
The inmate is, unfortunately for Caitlyn's lesbianism, very striking. Bright pink hair, one side long and ragged and the other shaved. She's wearing just the white tank top, not the grey overshirt, so Caitlyn can clearly see the tattoos down the back of her muscled arms and over her strong shoulders, stretching up her neck.
"I can change," the inmate says innocently, her eyes pleading. "I'll be good to you now, Martha, I swear. I'll do anything."
"I don't believe you," Martha says flatly, "and it's not up to me anyway. Every other cellblock is past capacity and we've got an open bunk, so that's where she's going."
"But - " the inmate protests.
Martha turns around and keeps walking. "Off the railing, Vi," she calls.
The inmate, who must be Vi, looks at Caitlyn now and the innocent look vanishes. Her eyes are hard and cold and (once again, unfortunately for Caitlyn) very striking.
Then she just steps back, drops, and disappears from view. There's no immediate sound of a body shattering against the concrete floor or screams of panic, so Caitlyn can only presume that Vi somehow dropped ten feet down and landed silently and without injury.
Caitlyn's new cell is at the very end of the row.
Martha stops at the open door and gestures inside. "Here," she says.
Caitlyn steps inside and glances at Martha to see if there's any further instruction. But all Martha says is, "good luck."
Then she walks away.
Caitlyn takes a steadying breath and looks around.
The cell is tiny. Against the right-hand wall is a metal bunk bed that takes up most of the space. The lower bunk must be Vi's, because the bed is messily made. The upper bunk just has a thin vinyl mattress.
Past the bunk bed is a toilet and a tiny sink in one corner and a thin metal cabinet in the other corner. The door of the cabinet is open, revealing two shelves. Both of the shelves are occupied, some clothing and other various items thrown on each. Caitlyn already dreads having to ask Vi to move her things from the shelf that's so clearly for Caitlyn.
The walls and floors are the same grey concrete as the rest of the prison. The sheet and pillow on Vi's bed are white, and the thin blanket is grey just like the bundle Caitlyn is holding in her arms.
There's nothing else in the room.
On the walk here, Caitlyn saw some personal items in the other cells. Photos taped to the walls, some colourful children's drawings. But this cell has absolutely nothing.
Caitlyn looks at the upper bunk and realizes that there's no way to get up there without stepping on Vi's bunk. There's no ladder or step.
It may be Caitlyn's first day in prison, but she knows it's a bad idea to step on Vi's bunk.
She sets her bundle of clothes and bedding on the bare vinyl mattress and then grabs on to the edge of the metal frame. It's tricky, and it takes a lot of strength, but she manages to brace her foot on the frame of the bed instead of on Vi's bunk and use that leverage to haul herself up and onto the upper bunk.
It takes her a few minutes to wrangle the thin sheet onto the thin mattress. It's a simple enough task, but she's kneeling on the mattress, so it's a little trickier. Once that's done, she neatly spreads the blanket over the sheet and tucks the scratchy pillowcase over the sad, wibbly pillow.
That leaves her with just her second set of clothing and the small pack of toiletries she was given. There's not much in it; a toothbrush with a rubber handle and only a few bristles, a small tube of toothpaste, a thin bar of soap, and a flexible tube of deodorant.
Caitlyn picks up the deodorant and examines it. She's never seen anything like it before, but she understands why they won't hand out toiletries that have any sort of rigid plastic that could be used as a weapon. She supposes that this deodorant functions more like a cream that she'll squeeze out of the tube and apply with her hands.
She tucks the items back into the little bag and then sets it on top of her neat stack of clothing. She sits back against the wall, crossing her legs and folding her hands in her lap.
No one has come to her cell, but the noise from the common area below is loud. The inmates are certainly social; there's laughter, shouting, insults. A few of them must be playing a game of some kind, because Caitlyn will hear the occasional chorus of increasingly raised voices and then loud cheers and some groans.
The television is on. Caitlyn doesn't recognize the show, but from the dialogue, it sounds like a cheap drama show.
Someone is singing, off-key. Someone else yells at them to shut up.
There's a repetitive thumping that Caitlyn can't identify.
Caitlyn clasps her hands together and tries to take a steady breath in. She lets it out. She does it again.
The noise is a sensory nightmare, and there's no way to escape it. She could cover her ears with her hands, but that sounds like a recipe for disaster.
She tells herself that she'll get used to it. She'll adjust. It'll become less overwhelming. It has to.
After a few minutes of sitting silently and attempting to adjust, Caitlyn eyes the toilet against the wall.
She knows she'll have to adjust to this too. The thought of using these facilities with the door wide open when anyone could walk in at any time is so humiliating that it feels like physical pain.
But she has to get used to it, and best that she goes now when there's no one else here. Ease herself into it, in a way.
She scrambles off the bunk and drops down.
Thankfully, no one comes in or walks by. She's back up on the bunk, hands washed and dried on her grey shirt, in less than a minute.
She sits back against the wall again. She doesn't know what she's waiting for.
A beating, maybe. An attack. She's a cop (well, she was), everyone knows it, and she's in genpop.
Perhaps it'll come later? Maybe they don't want to waste their free time with her.
Or maybe Caitlyn's new cellmate will kill her in her sleep.
After brooding about that for a while, Caitlyn decides that that's unfair. She doesn't know Vi at all. Maybe the woman will be kind and polite and respectful, despite not wanting Caitlyn in her cell.
Or maybe not.
Time will tell.
Caitlyn sits there all afternoon.
She doesn't know what to do.
She must've missed lunch. She has no idea when dinner will be or what the process will be regarding that. Do they eat each meal in the cellblock? Are they brought to a cafeteria?
Caitlyn came into this knowing it wouldn't be like a summer camp. She knows there's no itinerary full of activities and that no one will hold her hand and help her through this. But she wishes someone had given her the general structure of the day, at least.
She sits for a while longer.
Finally, a buzzer sounds. The clamour from down below gets louder and the sound moves.
Caitlyn's heart starts to pound. She assumes that free time is over and everyone has to be back in their cells until dinner, which means that Vi will be coming in.
Sure enough, Vi walks in only a moment later, pulling the door shut behind her.
She glares at Caitlyn as she comes in. It's a piercing look, and Caitlyn meets her eyes and holds them.
Vi drops into the lower bunk and disappears from Caitlyn's view.
Silence.
The silence continues.
A buzzer sounds, and there's a loud thunk as the cell door locks.
Is Vi just lying motionless on her bunk? Is she taking a nap? Is she glaring up at Caitlyn?
Caitlyn now feels like she can't move. She feels like she can't make a single sound.
So she sits there, and she sits there, and she continues to sit with her legs crossed and her hands folded in her lap until another buzzer sounds and the cell door unlocks for dinner.
Vi rolls out from her lower bunk and to her feet. She pauses to glare at Caitlyn viciously before yanking the cell door open and storming out of the room.
Caitlyn takes a steadying breath and climbs off her bunk. She winces as her feet land on the floor - her legs are tingling from sitting like that for so long.
Then she takes another steadying breath and steps out of the room.
It turns out that dinner is served in a cafeteria. Thankfully, it's fairly easy to figure out what the process is to get there. Everyone lines up as the guards shout at them, calling out inmates by name when they get too rowdy.
Caitlyn steps into line. She focuses her energy on remaining outwardly calm. Hands by her side, shoulders back. She's not trying to look arrogant, but she also doesn't want to look weak.
The women in line in front of her keep turning to look at her. They either glare or smirk, and then turn to their friends to whisper about Caitlyn. Or, in some cases, not whisper at all and instead discuss at full volume how much they hate cops.
Vi is near the front of the line. She's talking with two women with her back to Caitlyn. She's still wearing only the tight white tank she was wearing earlier, her grey overshirt nowhere in sight. Her loose grey pants ride low on her hips.
Caitlyn hears another inmate being lectured by a guard for not wearing her overshirt right behind Caitlyn. Interestingly, none of the guards seem to care about Vi. Does she have special privileges, maybe? Does she bribe them? Or is it a learned helplessness sort of thing, where they've just given up on admonishing her for it?
The cellblock door clicks and the line starts moving, ushered by the guards the whole way.
It doesn't take long to get there, and when they arrive, the cafeteria is just as grey and soulless as the cell block. Rows of tables and benches bolted to the floor and grey concrete block walls.
Dinner is served on grey plastic trays. There are no customizations - each inmate receives exactly the same tray from a concession window along one wall.
Caitlyn takes her tray, idly wondering about people with allergies or food intolerances. There's a significant number of women in this cellblock - surely at least a few of them have some kind of allergy or intolerance. Are they just not accommodated at all? Do they just have to eat food that will make them sick, or possibly endanger their lives?
As she ponders that, Caitlyn turns around and grits her teeth for the next stage of this. A lot of the tables are already full, the women laughing and chatting as they dig into their meals.
Caitlyn spots a table off to the side that's still empty, and she makes a beeline for it. That seems like a safer option than asking to sit with an already established group. She can only hope that this table isn't reserved for a certain group or something like that.
To her great relief, once everyone has collected their meal and found somewhere to sit, there are more tables than there are women. Several of the small tables near her stay empty, and Caitlyn eats her horrible meal in peace.
It really is disgusting. Everything is mushy, except for the bread, which is so dry that it cuts Caitlyn's mouth when she tries to eat it. The 'vegetables' have no flavour at all and if Caitlyn were served these in any other context, she would suspect that she's being served baby food. She thinks the meat is chicken, but she's not completely sure, which is both intriguing and concerning. She's actually quite fascinated by this. She wants to know where this meat product came from and how it was processed to turn into this. There's an art to making a food item appear and taste this disgusting, really.
For a beverage, all she has is the water cup that was set out on the window with the tray. The water itself is lukewarm, and to her disgust, the plastic cup is noticeably grimy.
But Caitlyn drinks the water, and she eats the food. She has no choice. If she does not eat and drink, she will simply wither away from dehydration and hunger until medical intervention becomes necessary, and she has no plans to stage such a hunger strike.
She can hear the other inmates talking about her as she eats. Making jokes about what they want to do to cops. Gossiping about who she is, why she's in here.
Caitlyn ignores all of it. She stares at her food as she eats, and once she's done, she picks a random cement block on the wall to stare at so that she doesn't accidentally let her gaze drift to anyone.
She doesn't have to wait for long. Another buzzer sounds, and everyone gets up. Caitlyn lines up again after dropping off her tray and cup, and the slow procession back to the cellblock begins.
Once they return, it seems to be free time again. Caitlyn sees Vi sprawled out in one of the armchairs with a small group of women clustered around her. They're all chatting and laughing at something.
Caitlyn goes straight upstairs to her room.
Then she mentally corrects herself.
It's not her room. It's her cell. It's her cell, because Caitlyn is in prison, and will be for the next year of her life.
She forces down a wave of… panic? Fear? Sadness? Rage? Maybe all of those combined. None of those emotions will help her now, so she pushes through it and climbs back up onto her bunk.
Then she remembers the washroom situation, and she hurries to use the toilet again before Vi or anyone else comes into the room.
Vi doesn't come in until the buzzer sounds. She shoves the door shut behind her, leaving her and Caitlyn alone again.
The immediate reduction in the noise from the pod outside feels wonderful. Caitlyn, who is once again sitting cross-legged on the bed with her hands folded in her lap, nearly sighs with relief.
Vi looks up at her, glares, and then goes over to the cabinet. She grabs her toothbrush and toothpaste and heads back to the tiny sink to start brushing her teeth.
Caitlyn sits quietly, trying not to stare at her. It's difficult, considering the cell is tiny and there's nothing else to look at. The muscles bunching under Vi's tattoos are also drawing Caitlyn's eyes with a magnetic pull, but she bravely and heroically resists staring. She stares at the cell door instead.
She waits until Vi has finished brushing her teeth and is putting her toothbrush and toothpaste back in the cabinet before politely saying, "excuse me."
Vi slowly turns to look at Caitlyn like she can't believe Caitlyn had the audacity to speak.
"I'm sorry to bother you," Caitlyn says carefully, "but I was wondering if you could move your items from the upper shelf in the cabinet. Or the lower, it doesn't matter. It's just that I have nowhere else to put my things, and I didn't want to move your items without permission."
Vi's stare morphs into a glare. Caitlyn cringes inwardly, but keeps her outward countenance impassive.
But to her surprise, Vi just says tightly, "don't touch my shit." She turns back to the cabinet, grabs her things from the top shelf, and shoves them onto the lower one.
"Thank you," Caitlyn says quietly. Vi only gives her another glare.
Caitlyn remains where she is as Vi finishes going through her nightly routine, staring resolutely at the cell door instead of at Vi. When Vi finally gets into her own bunk underneath Caitlyn's, Caitlyn steels herself to get up and start getting ready for bed herself.
The lights flick off.
It's so dark.
Caitlyn didn't expect it to be this dark.
There's a small amount of dim light coming in through the narrow window in the door, but it's not much. It's certainly not enough to see by.
Caitlyn tries to take some steadying breaths. Her eyes will adjust. She just needs to give it some time.
Sure enough, her eyes do eventually adjust. She sits and she breathes and she does not panic and eventually she can see the vague outlines of things in the room and not just darkness.
Caitlyn jumps down from her bunk, not daring to use Vi's lower bunk to get down. She avoids looking at Vi as she struggles to find where her bag of toiletries ended up on her bed.
Once she finds the bag, she stays as quiet as she can as she brushes her teeth and puts the toothbrush and toothpaste back. She desperately wants to wash her face, but the sink is tiny. She'll likely splash water everywhere, which will likely anger Vi.
Fine. That's fine. Caitlyn will forgo washing her face. Washing her face would be a comfort, and that's something she's being denied. Comfort in all forms is being denied to her, because this is a punishment, and punishment does not include comfort. Caitlyn understands that.
Despite her understanding, this all feels very hard to get used to.
She takes a moment to put her change of clothes and other items on the shelf Vi cleared for her.
Caitlyn then has to undergo what, to her, is the most uncomfortable thing she's had to do yet. She has to use the toilet in this tiny, tiny, cell, so horrifyingly close to a stranger.
There is no alternative. Caitlyn has to get used to this. This will be her life for the next year. There is no other choice.
She grits her teeth and does it. She gets through it, her face burning in the darkness, and then quickly pulls herself back up to her bunk as fast as she can.
Caitlyn lays down in the darkness, pulling her thin, ratty blanket over her.
It's a very uncomfortable bed. Easily the worst Caitlyn has ever slept on, which is to be expected.
The mattress is thin. It's better than nothing, but there's barely any cushioning between Caitlyn and the metal bunk. It's cold, too - Caitlyn hadn't realized how much warmth a typical mattress provides until now.
The cell is cold, the mattress is cold, the bunk is cold, and the blanket barely helps. Caitlyn tries curling up, which helps a little, but the bunk is so narrow that her legs are close to the edge like this.
Caitlyn closes her eyes and tries to relax. She needs to sleep. She needs to be ready for tomorrow.
Sounds trickle in from outside the cell. Somewhere else in the cellblock, someone is banging on a door and shouting incoherent sentences between each bang. A guard yells back, and there's another bang like the guard hit the door with their baton. It does not stop the yelling and the banging.
Someone is speaking over the intercom out in the main part of the pod, giving information about an alert in another cellblock.
Caitlyn can hear Vi breathing in the bunk below. She's not breathing loudly, and she's not snoring, so that's a relief. Just soft, even breaths.
There's a moment of shuffling, like Vi rolled over, and then silence again.
Caitlyn opens her eyes and stares into the darkness.
She feels… trapped. Caged in. She is caged in. She is, quite literally, trapped in a cage with no means of escape.
She needs to think about something else, or she'll start to panic. Caitlyn closes her eyes again and tries to pretend that she's at home in bed.
She was there just this morning. The memory is fresh. Her bed is soft, so soft. Her sheets are silky and her duvet is heavy and warm. She has more pillows then she really needs, because she likes to be able to twist and turn and still have a pillow to rest on or curl around. The room around her is cool but not too cold, and it's so quiet. It was raining this morning when she woke up, just a little, and she could hear the sound of the raindrops against the window.
"Hey!" someone yells, close enough to Caitlyn's cell that it's loud and jarring. Her eyes fly open, the memory she'd been conjuring vanishing. "Hey! If you don't let me out of here, I'm going to kill her!"
It must be the cell next to Caitlyn's. Caitlyn waits for the sound of guards running, hurrying to open the door and assess the situation.
She hears none of that.
Beneath her, Vi's breathing is still even and slow. Caitlyn thinks she might be sleeping right through this.
"Okay then!" the woman next door yells. "I'm going to kill her!"
No one comes.
Caitlyn does not find that comforting.
She doesn't hear any screaming or subsequent sounds of fighting from next door, so she can only hope that the woman had been bluffing.
Caitlyn closes her eyes again, tugs the blanket tighter around herself, thinks of her mother for some reason, and then forces the thought away before the pain can rip through her and weaken her because she cannot afford to be weak here. Not here, not now, likely not until she's released.
She forces her muscles to relax. She breathes in and out, slowly and evenly. She really is exhausted, which helps.
She breathes, and breathes, and finally falls asleep, mercifully ending the third worst day of her life thus far.