Chapter Text
“We really gotta stop meeting like this.”
“Trust me, nothing would make me happier.”
The grin he throws you, all bright white teeth, lodges in your chest like a knife, but before you have time to think about the nuanced underpinnings of that, your savior flicks out an actual knife, saws through the zip ties cinching your wrists to each other and the pole behind you, and kneels to repeat the process on your ankles.
He allows you all of five seconds to rub the sore red lashes from your stiff joints before pulling you along, towing you behind him as he sets a breakneck pace down the dimly lit tunnel. You follow as best you can with pins and needles arcing up your calves, white-hot with static after being tied up for—hours? Days?
You shake your head slightly, discarding the latter thought: the first time he’d come to save you (three months ago now), you’d been handcuffed to an old bedframe in a warehouse for two days, and you’d had to pee far more severely than you did now. You’d been a captive for mere hours, then, which you had to say was a distinct improvement.
You tell the Man as much, and his shoulder flexes, as though he thinks about slowing for an instant, before his incredulous eyes meet yours mid-step.
I’m risking my life for an insane person, he’s thinking. I should have let the counter tick down to zero with those zip ties intact. Saving this person is going to get me killed.
You know it already, know the conflict between heroic morals and self-preservation that’s bound to be waging in his brain. Pins and needles race up your limbs again in anticipation of being dropped once the clock gets too close for comfort.
But when his eyes lock onto yours, they’re sky blue and dizzyingly free of the great war you’d imagined.
“Fix the habit of getting yourself kidnapped every two weeks and we’ll talk,” he throws over his broad shoulder, his fingers still wrapped firmly around your wrist.
“It’s not a habit,” you protest, kicking up into a run with him at the abrupt, obnoxious blare of an alarm.
He scoffs, bright eyes rolling, but doesn’t offer a comeback. The alarm’s shrill shriek takes on another few decibels and a faint curse falls from his lips, the black word stamped out to dust under your pounding soles.
You round a corner and immediately wince, throwing up a hand to shield your eyes; daylight floods over your retinas, white as snow and nowhere near as soft.
“Sorry, doll, I’ve gotta get a little more hands-on.”
And with that, the Man hefts you up over his shoulder and takes off into the light, feet hammering on the ground like war drums before you feel his legs bunch up beneath you and explode outwards with a grunt.
The giant leap he takes has two immediate effects: first, it plunges you directly into the blinding white sea of light you’d recoiled from, effectively rendering your eyes useless for a few more seconds. Second, it reduces your sense of stability to zero; with a yelp you wish sounded just a little more dignified, you scramble for something, anything to grab onto, and wind up wrapping your arms around flesh—thick muscle, stretching under your frantic fingertips.
The Man laughs, a grainy, rolling sound like the tumble of roasted coffee beans against a grinder, and warns, “Tickle me and I might just drop you.”
Undiluted, paralyzing panic shoots through you and you stiffen; his hands immediately contour to you, holding you securely against him, and you recognize the punchy joking tone in his voice.
“Quit tossing me in the air without any warning and we’ll talk,” you snap without any real heat, any venom a byproduct of your still-processing shock and terror.
Your comment prompts another soft chuckle and a tightening of his grip against your thighs. It’s almost reassuring.
The body under your clenched hands ripples and you try to distract yourself from the (still utterly terrifying) sensation of moving unsupported through the air by figuring out which part of your unknown knight in bulletproof armor you’ve got a death grip on.
The texture under your fingers is rough like canvas but stiff and hard, as though it’s pulled taut over a panel of metal—a bulletproof vest? As if in answer to your question, the edge of a secondary strap hits the heel of your palm and the Man’s abdomen jerks under the flat of your hand as he grunts sharply.
“You trying to cop a feel?” he asks. His voice is light but there’s a gruffness layered in it; you’re very close to stepping over a line and you know it.
“No,” you squawk, very aware of how much your survival currently depends on this man’s benevolence towards you. “No, I was just trying to get a better grip—and you know, make sure I don’t fall out of the sky!”
Your indignation flares up, as does his when he objects, “Hey, I got you. Don’t cha trust me?”
You can picture the glint in his eyes as he says it—a clever, crooked arc like a crescent moon hung low and lingering in summer sky. The color of that sky—stronger than cerulean, less temperamental than turquoise—fills in your mental vision, touching all the other unseen contours of his face (the hint of a wide, straight nose, a square jaw whose edge lay fuzzy with stubble, even in shadow).
Even though you still don’t really know what he looks like, this little detail makes it unbelievably easy to answer his question.
“Yeah. I don’t think I should, but I do.”
It slips out from your mouth like a hasty sip of water, and for a second the Man is so silent you think that you’ve made a grave error—perhaps the last one you’ll ever have the privilege of making.
But then he clears his throat and says, in a way that says he’s trying too hard to sound normal, “You can open your eyes, you know.”
“What do—” Halfway into your rebuttal, your eyelids flutter open and you blink rapidly, realizing that you’d kept them screwed shut despite—well, despite what, exactly, you don’t quite know, but your internal armchair psychologist mutters something about extreme fear and instinctual responses.
The first thing that floods your vision is a pane of smooth, unruffled blue, so perfect you wonder for a moment if it’s real; the second is the shiny, high-tech drone the Man is balancing on, and which is currently carrying the two of you on its back like some giant metal bird.
“Hey!” You punctuate your vexed outburst with an open palm to the Man under you; too late, with the sound of your slap and his “oof” resounding in the air, you realize that you’ve just smacked his ass, and none too gently.
He seems too shocked to kill you (or drop you, for that matter), so you seize the moment and barrel onwards. “You threatened to drop me!”
A surprised laugh rattles from his throat, his hands loosening on you so that you grab back onto his waist and cling there.
“That was for tickling me,” he says after a while, as though it’s painfully obvious and he’s taking pity on you by pointing it out. Something mischievous and not wholly tame licks at his voice when he adds, “What do you think that spank oughta get you?”
An accent thickens his words, molds the end of “get” and beginning of “you” into one bite like the chew of a candy apple, leaning heavy on the vowels so that they slide into one another. Even in the heart-stopping, apprehensive thrill of the moment, you file away this detail and add it to your mental portrait of the Man.
You bite on your tongue so you don’t stammer—babble, really—but just as you’ve got a suitably cocky response ready to deliver, there’s a low whine from the drone and the Man announces, “Thank you for flying Rescue Air, we have reached our destination.”
He steps down with you still slung over his shoulder (Like Santa Claus and his sack of presents, you think bizarrely) and tells you, “I’m going to put you down.”
“Okay,” you mutter, dreading what comes next; it’s like a dance at this point, with both of you so well-practiced that you could do this with your eyes closed—which ironically, would make his job easier.
He bends until your feet touch the ground; you adjust your weight and let go of him, ready to stand up as he slips the black, lightproof hood over your head. Instead, he pauses, one heavy hand on your lower back keeping you bent; your nerves kick into overdrive with every prolonged second that your rhythm deviates from the routine it’s always been.
Something rustles, followed by a dull thunk as though he’s tossed something into the grass. Then, his voice, husky and urgent, hushed in a whisper although you can feel the hot pulse of his breath on your legs, hitting just above your knees.
“What color are my eyes?”
The answer tingles on the tip of your tongue, a shining secret like a pearl ready to tumble off into his waiting ears—but why does he want to know? Your mind races through the question lying behind the one he asked at the speed of light—obviously he knows what color his own eyes are, and it can’t be out of idle curiosity. Your memories of what usually comes next flash through your head—the hood blocking out your sight until it’s replaced by wraparound sunglasses, the woman who looks different every time but sounds exactly the same, the tea she gives you, the inevitable nap you always float into afterwards and the fuzziness that follows.
It’s what’s written on the note left for you when you wake up that decides you, though: It’s for your safety.
You run your tongue over your lips, the color of the sky filling your mind, and answer the Man. “Brown.”
“My eyes are brown.”
It doesn’t sound entirely like a statement or a question. It just sounds like he’s waiting. Testing you.
“Well, you seem like a brown-eyed kind of guy,” you say innocently, shrugging your shoulders as best you can while still suspended at a vaguely forty-five degree angle; the Man had risen slightly from his own bend, pushing you up onto your tiptoes. “Want me to guess other stuff about you? You flex in the mirror when you pass by, you’re a dog person, and your favorite cookie is chocolate chi—”
“Alright, alright,” he interrupts, hands sliding from your back to your hips and putting you on the ground. He’s even faster than normal this time, slipping the hood over your head before you get a glimpse of his shoes or the grass under them; you straighten your spine and glare (hopefully at him).
“Just because I call out your indulgences in vanity doesn’t mean I’m not entitled to some fresh air,” you declare haughtily, planting your hands on your hips.
He chuckles from your left and loops an arm through one of the gaps created by your jutting elbows; it’s a surprisingly gentlemanly gesture and one that leaves you feeling awkwardly like a teenager going to prom.
“You’ll get plenty of fresh air soon,” he promises, and you tell yourself you’re imagining the added warmth in his words.
The steps he guides you in slow, and the clock—not a bomb timer this time—ticks louder in your ear, counting down the seconds you and the Man have left.
Leaves whisper softly under a newcomer’s light step and you feel time run out from between your fingertips.
Brightly, you squeeze the Man’s arm in the crook of your elbow and turn your face to him, smiling widely despite the fact that the hood hides your face entirely.
“So, same time next week?”
He doesn’t answer, but when you take another step forward, his arm doesn’t move with yours, staggering you back half a step.
A woman’s voice (the Woman) chimes in, smoky quartz rolling into a foreign language—a question, from the intonation, and the Man answers quietly, neither of their voices betraying any emotional clues.
You fight the urge to whip your head to and fro to follow the conversation, biting the inside of your cheek as you wonder what exactly you’ve gotten yourself into. Yes, being born into a significantly wealthy family, particularly one with a growing web of connections, came with its own set of hazards (being kidnapped on a near weekly basis, for example), but this was quickly adding up a little too high.
The Woman sighs and touches your arm; you start despite the gentleness of her fingers. Somehow, you don’t doubt that the same slender hand is more than capable of ripping your throat out given the right reason.
The hood is whisked away and before you can stop yourself, you turn to search behind yourself, but the Man is long gone—and besides, you doubt you’d be able to identify him based on what you have. When you twist back to face the Woman, her face wears something between exasperation and curiosity.
The mixture smooths into a flawless, friendly smile and she links her arm with yours just like the Man had—same gesture, but very different according to the responding neurons firing in your chest. You slide on the dark aviators she hands you without a word, suddenly numb.
“Ready?” she says, though it’s not really a question. No accent.
The rest of the journey proceeds as usual: she drives you home (today’s pass off was a very pretty copse God knows where, but far from the city), waits for you to unlock your door (why the secret agents don’t think the spare key hidden under your doormat is a liability, you’ll never know), and ushers you into your own home like a caring sister.
Usually, she’ll direct you into something resembling small talk while she bustles about your kitchen, preparing your tea, but today she guides you into a chair and then takes one opposite from you. Her legs curl up under her gracefully, like a cat, and you wonder who the Woman is, and who she is to the Man. Girlfriend? Wife? Sister?
A giddy thrill runs through you at the realization that you can drive a tentative wedge through the last thought with your new information: the Man has blue eyes, the Woman green. It’s not exactly hard evidence for or against anything, but it’s more knowledge than you had this morning.
“Anything interesting happen today?” she asks, as though she’s a friend you’re meeting for lunch, or your mother when you call home unannounced. Today the Woman’s hair is honey blond and long, tied back in a neat ponytail. You stare at it, suddenly afraid to meet her eyes.
“Aside from the whole abduction thing?” you ask her hair, switching your gaze to her shoulder (she’s toned, you note with a faint pang of…envy? Awe? Resignation?) when she casually flips the blond tail behind her.
“Yeah, aside from that,” she replies coolly, almost bored. You half expect her to raise a hand to inspect her cuticles.
“Uh…”
Obviously, your mind lands on the Man’s deviations from the usual routine, but you’re not about to tell the Woman that. She purses her lips, eyes fixed on you (Cat! Major cat vibes!) and you struggle to come up with something before she does something even more cat-like, like jump onto your face or knock over the empty coffee mug on the table between you.
“…they used zip ties this time?” you offer, holding out your cramped wrists, red marks still visible, like an offering.
She looks down at them flatly. Her lip twitches, and you can’t tell if she’s holding back laughter or anger. Either way, you’re morbidly fascinated and can’t quell the wave of dual alarm and relief that crashes over you when she lifts her green gaze to yours and smiles.
Her teeth glint in the sun as she tells you, voice back to concerned and sisterly, “Get some rest, you’ve had a long day.”
And with that, the Woman unfolds her long, lean legs from the chair and walks out, locking your door from the outside.
You stare after her until you hear her car purr back to life and drive away, and only then does your gaze fall again on the empty coffee mug precariously close to the edge of the table. You lean over and nudge it into safety, and it hits you.
She didn’t make you tea.