A Fragile Life

AN: Ahhhh well here we are. Number 1 of the promised 2 chapters, posted for you all to enjoy :] I literally wrote this in the backseat of my mum\'s car on my laptop on the 6 hour drive home from our holiday, so I hope that you all enjoy it for what it\'s worth. The next one will be coming very soon for you all. As always thank you SO much for your lovely reviews and I hope that I haven\'t disappointed you with this chapter.... And I hope you\'re all looking forward to the next one when, dun dun duuuuun all things are revealed















“God... I’m never drinking again.”



Any outside viewer might wonder where the voice came from. Enswathed within the loving confines of many thick, plush blankets, and head buried beneath the silken pillows that she’d lain on, Elle was barely visible. She, of course, had no idea about any of this. Eyelids plastered shut against some bright light that had awoken her, she had no idea about the lush four-poster bed she lay in, the cornfield gold bedding, nor indeed the four walls of shimmering white that housed not only the bed, but also the many bookcases filled with both novels and CD’s, and the overstuffed furniture that decorated the room. As far as Elle was concerned, the world was a womb of happy, quiet warmth and she would have been quite happy to sink back into her world of dreams. The throbbing headache was having none of that though.



Eyes still shut, Elle groped for her bedside drink bottle which she always kept full because she so often woke up thirsty. Blindly patting the space where it should have been, Elle could find nothing but empty air though. Shuffling over a little further she finally gripped around something long, cylindrical and distinctly drink bottle shaped. Weird... it was almost as if it had been thrust into her hand. Deciding it was far too early in the morning to question it, Elle snuggled under her blankets once more, drink bottle firmly nestled in her palm. This little triumph in hand she took long gulping sips from the bottle, before finally easing herself up in the bed and arching her body backwards into a long, delicious stretch. Body clicked into place, she finally opened her eyes for the first time since she had awoken.



Quitoon would tell people for years later that he’d heard her scream carry all the way across The Great Field and through the Airey Mountains to where he’d sat fishing in one of the craggy glens of Blood Lake, but we’ll get to him later.



Elle screamed. She screamed until her lungs burned with a red-hot fire, and then she gasped a heaving breath and screamed some more. Her father had always said she had a good set of lungs on her. This was definitely not her bedroom. Her bedroom, for one thing, wasn’t bursting full of antique furniture that would probably break if she looked at it too hard, was roughly the size of a walk in closet and generally speaking didn’t have a man who wouldn’t look out of place in a 50’s gangster movie lounging casually besides her bed. The night before suddenly came back to her in a flood of memories.



The club, the creepy guy at the bar... The man in the room was Lucian.



Taking the first thing at hand, the now half empty drink bottle, she threw it at him with all her might as she scrambled out of the plush bed, stumbling a little in her hurry, and backed as far away from him as she could. She had almost reached a large, ornate metal door that she assumed would lead out of this godforsaken place when the tug of something at her ankle stopped her from going any further. A length of cord, a delicate few strands of shimmery, silken material, was loosely tied around her ankle. It looked as if it would snap in half at the slightest disturbance, so then why, when she tried to tug her ankle free was it was almost as if it seemed to tighten around her tender flesh?



The Bastard had, of course, by this point caught the drink bottle and placed it on the floor besides him. He looked so bloody, casual sitting there in the chair that Elle was tempted to throw something else at him. She’d never been one to resist temptation before so she grabbed a heavy, leather bound book from the shelves of one of the many bookcases and threw it at him with as much force as she could, following this assault with the rest of the contents of the bookcase. After catching a few of them in his large hands and placing them next to the drink bottle, Elle could almost see him sighing in exasperation as he gave up and let the books fly at him, showing no apparent pain or even annoyance when the books hit him.



Seeing it was having no effect on him, Elle switched to a verbal assault, screaming all the obscenities she knew and several that she made up on the spot. This went on for several minutes as he sat there impassively, showing no sign that he could even hear her, other than a small smile when she called him a ‘cock-sucking- arse-weasel.’



When she finally ran out of names to call him she sat down and began pulling at the cord wrapped around her ankle, deciding that if he was just going to sit there and watch her, she’d get this damn thing off of her and get the hell out of here and to a hospital to get a rape kit. Somewhere it registered that she was still fully dressed, but that didn’t mean anything. Waking up tied to the bed of a man who had obviously kidnapped her was a much worse sign. Keeping one eye on him as she worked at the obnoxious rope which resisted all of her efforts to pull, gnaw and rip it off, she noticed him checking his wrist, presumably to see the time. ‘What? Do you have somewhere to be?’ She silently fumed.



“No actually, I am just wondering how long exactly until you will tire yourself out and we may get down to business, as they say.”



Looking up, startled, Elle wondered if she’d voiced the question out loud.



“No you did not.”



Absurdly, all she could think was... ‘Oh what now? Can he read my fucking mind or something?”



“Yes, yes I can. So now, as I said, shall we get down to business?” He spoke in that low, melodic voice with a hint of malice to it, as if he found himself in this situation every day. While Elle struggled to digest this piece of information, that this man somehow knew her thoughts and claimed to read her mind it all became suddenly blindingly clear to her.



She stood, abandoning her attempts to untie the rope around her ankle and paced over to of the overstuffed gilt chairs and sat in it, head cradled in her hands.



“Oh my god. It’s happened hasn’t it? I’ve finally lost it. I’ve turned into my mother.”



She continued to rant to herself about going crazy, tears welling in her eyes at the thought of it. She’d have to quit her job at the bookstore and get herself committed, just like her mother. And she wouldn’t be able to flat with Casey any more. God, this was terrible.



Lucian, if he, and indeed this entire situation wasn’t all some elaborate hallucination her addled mind had created, apparently grew sick of her behaviour, because he finally stood from his chair and strode over to her, grabbing her roughly by the shoulders and shaking her once, twice, three times until she finally quit her babbling and stared up at him, mouth hanging open like a dead fish, her face slack and her eyes frantic with stress.



“You will listen to me. You are quite sane. This place, and I, are not some figments of your imagination. It is all quite real, and the sooner you accept this, the easier this will be.”



She listened to his words, but they didn’t seem quite right. A psychologist would tell her that to her the idea that she had lost her mind was easier for her to process than the fact that she had been kidnapped by someone who could read her mind, but Elle was no psychologist.



“I... you... do you... want money? Because I don’t have any. And neither do my parents. Well my parents are dead but, I don’t have any money for ransom.” She was babbling again. What on earth was it about this man that made her babble like a nervous school-girl.



He chuckled slightly at the idea that he wanted her for ransom money. He had seen the hovel that she called home, knew to a penny the amount in her bank accounts. And she could well see the opulence of her surroundings. The Guardian had no use for money.



“Elle, calm yourself, look at your surroundings angel, does it look I need your ransom money?”



“Are you... going to kill me then?”



Her voice trembled as she spoke. He could kill her, she was sure of that, she was tied up in a room, she didn’t know where she was, and she doubted anyone else did either. Elle had heard whispers about eccentric billionaires who’d kidnapped young girls and tortured or raped them, or some combination of the two. And if he didn’t want ransom money... then that dramatically reduced the options of what he wanted with her. The rumour about the billionaires was mostly just that of course, it was all rumours and whispers, but, fuck, looking around at the situation she was in, Elle knew that it must true. Oh God, she was going to die. He was going to hack her to pieces and kill her and rape her and... fuck. Well if she was going to die, it was going to be with dignity. She stared up at him with a brave face, ignoring the tears that steadily dripped down her cheeks.



Lucian caught one with a finger, slipping it into his mouth and lapping his tongue over the wetness, eating her tear, obviously unmoved by them.



“No. I am not going to kill you.”



“What?” She’d been so busy imagining the ways that he was going to kill her that she hadn’t even considered the option that he might not actually kill her. Which was... still not necessarily a good thing.



“Nor am I going to rape or maim you, or any of the things that your pretty little head is imagining.”



To be fair, she’d held it together remarkably well right up until now. Lucian, a virtual stranger looming over her, in a strange place where she would almost certainly never be found, tied to a bed, she’d managed all of these. Strangely what finally set off the panic was a sudden fleeting thought that she was going to be late for work. She burst into a thick flood of tears, kicking and scratching at him in jerky, panicked motions. It wasn’t the pretty silent crying that you see in the movies either, it was the loud, heaving kind where the tears mixed with snot, and your face blushed red from exertion and your body wracked with the force of your sobs.



“P-Please just... just let me go, fuck please, I just want to go home. Please I wont tell anyone, just untie me and... fuck please, please!”



“I’m afraid that’s really not an option Elle.” He spoke over her tears as if they weren’t there, letting her kick and scratch at his chest until finally he bent down in front of her and pulled her much smaller body to his, holding her there as much as she struggled, with seemingly no effort on his part. He held her like this until she finally calmed down, her defeated hands dropping to her side as he whispered to her in a foreign language that she’d never heard before.



Pulling back slightly, he pulled a tissue from somewhere and held it out to her, which she used to wipe her face clean, balling it in her fist when she was done.



“Are you quite finished? I must say, this is not going nearly as well as I had hoped it would.”



He looked almost puzzled as he said this, as if he couldn’t understand why she was so upset.



“W-why are you doing this? Why me?”



“Perhaps I am simply lonely.”



“If you’re lonely you don’t kidnap someone! You buy a puppy!” She almost screamed those words, well on her way to becoming hysterical again. As if sensing this, he slapped her lightly across the face, happening to hit the place where he had sucker-punched her last night. She yelped in pain, her hand coming to prod at the tender flesh of her jaw.



“Why does my jaw hurt so much?” She asked quietly, not sure if she wanted the answer.



“I am afraid in the course of subduing you I may have been a little over zealous.”



“Over... over zealous!? I... you... when you untie me I am going to rip your balls off and stirfry them with a nice teriyaki sauce and feed them to you!”



“Well then, that is not much incentive for me to untie you is it?



It was that slightly mocking tone to his voice that set her off afresh. Let no one say that Elle was not a fighter. She screamed furiously at the man, deciding that if he even if he wasn’t going to kill her, she was going to get as much damage in as she could to him. Backhanding him across the face as he had done to her so many hours ago she made another dash for the door, forgetting about the cord that tied around her ankle, and was now beginning chafe a dangerous red around where the skin was beginning to rub off.



With one sharp tug to said cord from Lucian, Elle literally flew backwards through the air and landed on the floor with a solid thump and a loud, aggrieved moan from the girl on the floor as her breath rushed out of her lungs. When she finally got her wind back enough to uncurl and look up, Lucian was once more looming over her.



“Are you quite finished? Or must I gag you to stop another outburst?”



She spat, and the thick gobbit of phlegm landed on his cheek, dripping down along to his jawbone where he wiped it off with his forearm. Apparently taking this as a ‘yes’ to being gagged, he grabbed her roughly by the hair and wrestled a thick wad of material over her gnashing lips, tying it behind her head in a makeshift gag.



“You know this is not going at all how I had hoped it would.”



What? She thought scornfully; did he expect her to be grateful?



“Well yes, I’d rather thought you might be. What kind of life did you have in the Middleland? Scared of your own shadow, moving aimlessly from one dead end job to another, one friend, no social life, desperately unhappy in the quiets of the nights when you thought no one could hear you. Did you not wonder what else there was? Did you not cry out to the Above to prove that there was more than this? I must say Elle, you really are tremendously ungrateful. I have reordered time and the lives of thousands, literally thousands of people so that you might see a world outside the Middleland. I have turned the world upside down and I have done it all for you. And you spit on me. I had expected a little more really.”



If it had been possible, at this point Elle’s mouth would have been hanging open in shock from his little speech. She was absolutely floored that this... this man not only expected her to be grateful, but sounded a little hurt that she wasn’t. Once she got past her outrage... it suddenly hit her. The words that he’d said, there was something wrong there wasn’t there? The Middleland? The Above? These questions all brought her back to that uncomfortable thought that had been bothering her since he’d professed to be able to read her mind.... who, or what, is he?



“Well finally we get down to the fun stuff. Can you stand?”



She nodded reluctantly, not sure what was coming next, and not quite ready to give up her struggle for freedom just yet.



“Wonderful. Let us take a walk.”



He offered her his hand, which she ignored as she pushed herself up from the floor and gestured at the restraint around her leg that was rapidly turning a fleshy pinkish red as her skin rubbed onto it and off of her flesh.



“Of course.”



With a flick of his wrist the rope was sliding slowly, almost sensually up her leg like a snake along its branch. It travelled slowly up her body, wrapping first up her thigh, then around her waist and up over her breasts, slithering down her quivering arm and tying itself in a knot around her wrist. She should have been shocked, she should have been terrified, but by this point her brain had almost gone numb from being so very overwhelmed and all she could think was; ‘a dream. This must be some crazy dream. I’ll just go along with it and I’ll wake up and things will be normal again.’



It\'s a well documented fact that when we find ourselves in overwhelming situations, our brain looks for the easiest way to explain it away. And the easiest way that Elle\'s brain could think of to explain this away was to sy that it was a dream. A crazy dream about a nice man she\'d briefly met the night before that she\'d wake up the next day and laugh about with Casey. It was much easier to believe this than the other possibility. That she was locked in a gilded cage with ropes that moved on their own, and a mind reader who had kidnapped her.



It was for this reason that Elle stood silently while Lucian took the now loose end of the rope that had uncoiled itself from her ankle after tying around her wrist, and for the same reason that when he tugged on her \'lead\' and started to walk out the door, she followed; a lamb to the slaughter.