Chapter Text
For just a moment, everything was a blur.
The details were fuzzy for a while, but from my last recalled memory, I was in the backseat of a car. I was laying on my side, my ears listening into the car engine purr, my eyes attempting to focus on what was going on. I had a memory of a gentle and familiar voice telling me that it’s going to be all okay in a repetitive mantra, as though it had been rehearsed.
I wondered why it seemed that way and upon waking up somewhere else, I really hoped that the uncanny sensation that violated me just moments ago had in fact been a dream — but looking around me, I knew it wasn’t.
I closed my eyes and tried to think of something else but couldn’t. In fact, I couldn’t recall a single detail about my life. All I could remember was the car ride.
Had I been drugged?
I tried getting up to investigate and once again to another degree of horror, I found myself bound in place under belts wrapped around a mattress. The rest of the room was far too dimly lit for me to tell the full extent of my situation either.
What was this—or rather, where was this?
I couldn’t remember, but I knew that I wasn’t supposed to be here.
Above that, everything also looked so strange. The windows were narrow and pushed up against the ceiling rather than straying towards the middle. Dim yellow lighting had filled the room with a menacing glow too, barely illuminating the dingy interior in which I was stored inside.
This had to have been a basement, right?
For a split second, I entertained the idea that I actually did remember everything but I was clouding my thoughts with panic which rendered me unable to think clearly, but even after coming down from the height of panic, my mind remained blank. I knew what to search for in theory, but it was as if my mind had been wiped blank.
All of this begged the question—why? Why was this happening to me specifically? The scarier realisation then emerged a second after. Who was doing this to me?
Certain memories still existed to me, just nothing present. I still knew what the concept of danger and I understood that there were good and bad people, but none of it really helped me remember. All I could understand was that someone brought me here, to this awful place and locked me up for an unknown reason.
Eventually though, my curiosity was answered by the click of a door where the light didn’t reach. I could gather that the door seemed to push inwards and from the way the floor creaked and from the sighed whisper of here we go again, confirmed to me that this indeed was not the first time that this has happened to me and that my captor was male. More questions started to form for me after that though, or rather, more possibilities. Maybe my memory loss had nothing to do with him going through this again, maybe I was simply just next in line.
I gulped. I then also squeezed my eyes shut as I heard him walk closer and closer to me, his heavy footsteps quaking the floorboards on impact. I listened in as the man sighed once more and felt him bring himself closer to me.
In my feigned slumber I felt a hand cup over my lips and struggled to remain calm, especially as his other hand then made its way down through my collarbones and along the measure of my chest. By that point, I had had enough of being violated though and tore awake, wide eyed and cold sweat dripping against my brows.
In a way, I didn’t expect the aggressor to be as young as he was. He looked not that much older than me, at least. He was pale and kind of sickly looking, but otherwise just a normal young man. His face wore two heavy bruised eyebags and the midsection bore a black stripe marking right across. I couldn’t quite tell if it was a birthmark or a tattoo, but something about it seemed organic either way.
Something about him seemed both familiar and foreign, proving my read on him to be inconsistent and as a result incredibly difficult. As I stared at him, he also stared at me too and after a while of doing so, he dared to pick up from where he left off, giving the implication that my apparent discomfort was nothing more than an obstacle for him to overcome.
“Stop,” I finally blurted out.
He seemed to listen and pulled back his hand much to my relief.
“Where am I?” I asked him this time. I wasn’t sure what kind of answer I wanted from him. Did I want him to be elusive for the sake of my ignorance or did I want the truth? I couldn’t tell.
“Home,” he bitterly replied, “or right below it.”
So, in a basement. Just as I suspected.
His voice was soft and melodic and deep and I felt guilty for liking hearing it. It reminded me of something I couldn’t quite remember in full, but I knew that I at least enjoyed listening to him talk. Something about him though was absolutely vile and sinister though and not just because of the situation he had me in.
There was something more to him than I knew.
“I’m not though, am I?” I ended up denying. I hoped that if I feigned ignorance for as long as I could, that he’d be less vague.
“Yes you are, silly,” he replied in a sort of sing-song way, as if mocking me. How condescending.
“No?” I shook my head.
“Well, it used to be,” he muttered, the warmth melting away from his face.
I didn’t know what he meant, though. That’s why I wanted him to be less cryptic and tell me but that didn’t seem to be on his agenda. Perhaps even, I suffered memory loss under his hand and keeping me in the dark was all part of his plan.
That's what he could have meant by going through this again and if that told me anything, was that this man was a danger to me in more ways than I could possibly ever know.
“Hey—don’t look at me like that,” he whined.
“Listen, I… I don’t know what you’re doing, but if this is my home then can you untie me? We can figure this out together and—“ I prompted, the panic in my voice leading the tone.
“—I can’t do that,” the man denied.
“Why?” I whined back.
“You wouldn’t understand so soon, love,” he assured me. “But hey, look. I’m going to take care of you alright? Just give me a chance this time.”
From that implication, I must have been here before and I must have done something that he didn’t like which must have led to him messing with my memory. Certain language quirks like calling me love and telling me to give him a chance this time led me to believe that at least this could have been an ill-fated relationship of some sort.
This begged another answer for my further question; what exactly has he done to me that my memory has been wiped to such an extreme extent and why does he keep doing this to me?
I could only play along if I wanted to find out. How humiliating.
“Okay...” I accepted. The warmth on his face returned.
“I’m the right fit for you, I swear,” he lit up, his expression bordering almost manic.
“But, I just want to know,” I couldn’t help but initiate. “How many times have we been through this?”
With how he withdrew, I was for a moment afraid that this would turn into just another forgotten memory and that I would wake up freshly confused again, but instead he just backed away and offered me a curt smile instead.
“Enough times, love,” he replied.
Ah, there’s the pet name again. That implied that he was at least fond of me, right? That he wasn’t set out to actually hurt me the way my imagination led me to believe, right?
I wanted to ask more but by the time I thought of my next question, he was already in the process of leaving the room and this time, he took the lights with him. It didn’t actually make it all that much darker because of how weak the bulbs were, but it did make it feel a lot colder somehow—suddenly, it felt even more unwelcoming.
I also managed to at least confirm one thing: at least I wasn’t going to die immediately, but I knew that I had to get out of here in case his patience was wearing thin.
After all, what if this was his final attempt?