This time it seemed to be a shower, he could hear the pipes beginning to gurgle. He was stripped even before he was fully awake, the ragged shirt and frayed jeans thrown down to cover the drain grate in the center of the room. The floor sloped upward slightly from the drain, and the showerheads were in three of the four upper corners of the room. There was a hook high on the wall in the fourth corner, possibly intended to hold his clothing, but he'd already learned not to bother.

Instead, he stood on the bundle of worn cloth, pinning it down as lukewarm water began to spray into the room. He bowed his head, ran his fingers through his hair, scrubbed somewhat fruitlessly at his grubby skin, and waited. The shower ran for half an hour and he needed only a couple minutes to finish his rinsing - the rest of the time was devoted to scrubbing the floor of his cell with a scrap of rag, trying to loosen the dirt and filth as the water level in the room rose. Just before it threatened to flood out into the hallway he yanked his clothing up, trying his best to clean it off in the last few minutes before the water shut off.

There would be another few gushes of water later, this one coming from a faucet about half-way up the wall, falling into a shallow circular depression in the stone floor. From this natural-seeming basin, a hollow gutter led straight to the drain. Primitive as this toilet was, he was quite grateful for it. The first few days of his imprisonment he hadn't even had that - oh, the drain was there, and with careful crouching he could more or less use it, but there was no water to rinse with, no way to clean his hands, and the stench started repulsing him after only the third day.