Work Text:
The fall was long and mind-blowing. The drop in his stomach was not the same one that came to him every time he pushed from the steam sled block. The slope was fast, but controlled. He could maneuver exactly how he wanted.
This fall was not that.
It was fast, and he kept falling faster. He was losing control. He was so confused as to how this hole got here and when it got here that he didn’t pay enough attention to his sled. It was slick with condensation from the steam and gilded out of his hands, just like it should in the powdery snow. He waxed it just before the race tonight too. Not that it mattered with his abysmal performance.
It slid away from him falling further and further, calling out for it. He was able to just barely tip it with his finger, but that only sent it further away from his grasps.
Suddenly, he hit the ground. Hard. It compressed beneath him, but his head still whipped dramatically from the impact. His chin was sent flying into his chest, biting his tongue so deeply it bled.
His whole back radiated with intense pain, burning and aching everywhere that hit the hill he landed on.
Troy's hand turned to feel the grass beneath him, but none was there. Instead, his hand touched incredibly soggy paper, to the point of it nearly falling apart in his hand. Even moving his hand felt like extraordinary effort.
He saw a bear man glance over to him and then look away. Confusion flooded his face before realizing it was probably from hitting his head too hard again.
His sled was nowhere nearby, and he couldn't move. His coach always told him to wiggle his toes after hitting his head too many times in front of him, just to make sure that he still had sensations and was able to move them. He tried, and was able to, albeit with some pain. Nothing like how badly the rest of his body hurt. His head pulsed with every beat of his heart, sending waves of excruciating pain through his skull.
He closed his eyes. It was probably the only thing he could do to dull the pain. The light was artificial and still managed to pierce his eyelids, but it wasn’t as intense as before
It wasn't long until he fell asleep.
He was jostled back to consciousness as he just barely saw someone in front of him. His eyes focused for a moment before a bag was pulled over his head.
In his delirium, he attempted to yank it off, but the only thing that happened was the pull of scratchy rope tying his arms together.
“What the fuck?” Troy slurred out.
He was pulled backwards by the rope on his wrists. It nearly made him fall from lack of warning, but he managed to stay on his feet.
“This some kind of prank?”
The captor remained silent.
“Fucking weird for you to do this! Do you know who my dad is?” Troy threatened.
He was pushed from the front this time, falling in a hard chair. It felt like wood, but he wasn't too sure if it actually was.
The person in front of him held him to the chair as the other tied him to it. He didn't even realize there was more than one person.
“Kidnapping me is not the way to get my dad to pay you,” Troy half-pleaded, though still using that same angry tone from before. “You’ll definitely get a lot less than if you stole, like, a fuck ton of soldiers or something. I'm just some guy.” He throws a forced laugh at the end, making sure he sounded as calm as possible.
The rope slid roughly against his arm with every movement. His arms got pulled when the rope was passed in and out of the posts of the chair. Something was tied around his ankles too.
And then there was nothing.
The rope didn't move anymore. He didn't feel unfamiliar hands on him. The room was silent. The footsteps were a distant memory. He couldn't see a thing. Even with the bag pulled over his head, he could tell when looking down into his lap that the lights were completely off. He couldn't even see the red of his suit.
Troy tried to fling his head to get rid of the bag, but it didn't budge. The only thing it did was send his head spiraling, his lack of vision somehow still swirling and making him nauseous.
“Guess I gotta do this the old-fashioned way.” Troy attempted to move his arms, but the rope was tied taut, leaving no room for even the slightest adjustment. The most he could do was wiggle his body slightly. His legs and arms were completely stuck, leaving not many options.
“Can you at least give me something to do in here while you wait for my dad or whatever?”
His question was met with silence. He wasn't even sure if the others were still here, watching him, or left to do something else.
“Are you even in here anymore?” Troy asked, “You know that it’ll be really fuckin’ easy to get out if there’s no one watching me.”
Troy looked around as if he could see anything from under the bag in the pitch black room. He loudly sniffed, hoping to smell out whoever took him in.
“Ughhh, fucking whatever, I guess. Just leave me here.” Troy paused, waiting to see if anyone took his fake admission of defeat. More silence followed. It was almost deafening, hearing his own voice echo in this room alone.
“You guys fucking suck.”
Troy heaved a sigh as he tried to occupy himself, already bored out of his mind. He needed something to do every second of the day, and if he couldn’t, everything would just become painful. His doctor told him it was something he needed to take meds for, but he just sold them to whoever on the team wanted them. He didn’t care about the cogs, but when offered, he wouldn’t refuse. They said they used them for fun or when they needed to pull an all-nighter for exams. He didn’t really ask them why they wanted them, but he wasn’t the type of guy to let down the team if he had any say in the matter.
Troy began tapping his thumb against the back of the chair, one of the few things he could move with some freeness. He listened to the sound of the thudding repeat, over, and over, and over. It was nice for a little bit, before he got bored again. Troy began to just make sounds. He couldn’t deal with the silence, the darkness, the lack of movement. He needed to do something.
He tried picturing his team for a second. It was pretty hazy. His “mind’s eye,” or whatever his English professor called it, was pretty bad. He could barely visualize most things. Especially not characters in a book. How was he supposed to remember that the girl had long, red hair, in a braid? He cared about Steam Sledding, not books.
Troy closed his eyes and popped his lips, sometimes making raspberries just to amuse himself. It had to have been hours. Troy was never all that good with keeping track of time either. He was supposed to wear a watch with a bunch of alarms in it, but he refused to wear it during races. It broke up the perfect, red silhouette he manicured for years.
With his eyes still closed, he heard something. A knock at the door.
“Hey, you coming back yet?” Troy shouted, angry.
No response. Then more knocks. It sounded hurried.
“What the fuck do you want? I can’t really do all that much.”
The knocks continued. They wouldn’t leave.
Troy had enough, and it had barely been a few minutes. “I can’t fucking help you! Go the fuck away!” he screamed.
Then, he heard a voice behind him. He whipped his head around despite not being able to see a thing. And then, he did see something. It was Lint? No, Josh? It felt strange. This whole thing felt strange. It didn’t sound like either of them.
“Yo, Lint? Josh? You here?”
He heard more unintelligible whispers in his ear. It still wasn’t Lint nor Josh, nor anyone else on the team for that matter. He had no idea who this voice belonged to.
“The fuck are you?” He plainly asked.
He felt something crawl on him, making him jump out of his skin as he screamed, “Fuck!” He tried to wiggle free, but he could still feel that thing on him, and he had no clue what it was, but he did not like it one bit.
It crawled up his leg. First one, then another on the other leg. And the feeling kept multiplying on and on. Troy shook his legs as much as he could to get these things off of him. How did they even get under his jumpsuit? Troy didn’t care much for an answer, he just wanted them gone. As far away from him as possible.
He felt a hand on his neck.
Troy slammed his head down, pain be damned, trying to get this person off of him. But when he threw his head down to trap their hand, he felt nothing. More accurately, he felt nothing on his chin, right where the hand should have been resting on his chest. He felt it on his chest. The hand was still on him, around his neck. It was going to strangle him, just to try and get a bigger payout from his dad.
He didn’t have training for this. He could sled well and could sign brand deals. Those were his fortes. Getting out of a hostage situation was not something he knew how to do.
“Get your fucking hand off of me,” Troy sneered, the fear oozing in slightly.
“Make me, Loseferd.” Jax. It was fucking Jax. His blood was boiling hotter than it ever had.
“You piece of SHIT–” Troy jerked his body as much as possible, but all that happened was the chair tilting to the side slightly before falling back into place. “Get the FUCK off of me!”
The hand wrapped tighter around him as he saw a glimpse of May before she fled his field of vision.
“Is this your whole fucking team?” He yells, “Are you that much of fucking freaks?! Let go of me, asshole!”
The hands climbed higher, the pressure light but threatening. “Yeah, Loseferd,” May jeered. She didn’t act like that before, but of course she wanted to suck up to the coolest guy in Airheart. Show her true colors when alone and outnumbering him.
“Shut the fuck up!”
“How was losing to a first-year? Sad? Disappointing? Heard you start crying over me.”
Troy flushed at her mention of him crying before continuing on, pretending she said nothing. “No the fuck I didn’t. What the hell is this?!”
Another glimpse of someone, this time Jax, entered his field of view. It was like he blinked and suddenly he was in front of him. He still felt the hands on him, but Jax was in front of him.
Suddenly, a cacophony of fans-turned-opponents started booing. It completely surrounded him. A cold shiver ran through his body. He must have been on the slopes. Troy could vaguely feel himself walking around, but it was airy and felt unstable, like he was floating through time. He turned to see people throwing their merch back at him, saying they don't want a failure. Troy wasn’t even sure what he had done. He lost a race, but people lose races sometimes, right?
Troy had to be better than them, of course. Who would he be if he wasn’t the best steam sledder in the school. He can lose every so often, but he better not be a laughingstock for Cloudspire, for his dad, for his whole school. “Use the loss for publicity,” he could practically hear his father say. Make yourself likable and not perfect in a technical sense, but still perfect to the people who look up to you.
Troy felt tears in his eyes and was unsure as to why they were there. He was confused, but if he cried every time he was confused, he would have been crying for the past 20 years.
The sounds flooded over him. They echoed so much that he could barely tell what words people were trying to yell at him. They overlapped as people hurled what was probably still insults and jabs at his being.
Troy had enough of this crowd, “I’m the best fucking steam sledder here. I have the whole city sponsoring me!” He proudly showed off his shoulder, making sure everyone around him could see the patches. But when he looked, all he saw was red.
“Oh, haha,” Troy laughed awkwardly, “Wrong side.” Troy looked to the other side and saw the same red shoulder as the other side.
He looked back to placate the crowd, but they weren’t there anymore. All that stood in their place was his father. His father alone.
“Oh, uh. Hi dad.”
“What did I tell you about your studies?”
Troy looked around himself. It was all black besides for the spotlight on his father. He never failed to make him feel small in comparison. He was bigger than everyone else he knew, in personality, in excellence. But his dad dwarfed him. His father could make so many things. He had such a likable personality that he displayed to the world, but would dissipate when he was alone with his son or low level employees.
“Uh…”
“Of course you wouldn’t remember.”
Troy deflated.
“You were supposed to go to class. And pass them.What son of mine would even be able to fail a math course.”
“It’s hard, dad. I don’t know what you fucking want.”
“Effort.”
Troy yelled, “I do put effort in! I don’t just fuck off all day! I go to class! I can’t fucking help if the teacher makes no fucking sense and the numbers all swish around. I can’t fucking do it.”
“Yes you can. You just don’t try.”
Troy sighed.
Immediately, his father said, “Do not sigh at me.” Troy looked in silence. “You can sled well, but that is where your abilities end.”
His father stood there, glaring at him. He stared into his soul. Getting to his soul, it pierced into Troy’s flesh and bones, almost literally. He felt what was surely holes in his skin. He couldn’t see them, not with his father’s gaze keeping his attention for once in his life, but he felt the sharpness of it. Even if it wasn’t quite pain, it was pointy and made him keenly aware of his whole body.
Everywhere he looked, his father would remain in his vision, disappointed in him. Sometimes, he could still hear the jeers of the crowd. He could hear Jax say, “Loseferd.” Everything on loop, hearing the crowd, hearing Jax, hearing the sighs of a man he once looked up to, but now struggled to even be near each other.
He felt a soft touch of someone’s hand touch his neck and jaw, seemingly on accident. As soon as it came, it left. The touch was colder than everything else that had touched him before. It felt more real than anything else around him, but that’s how it sometimes went if he got too bored. He heard rustling overtake the boos of his once-loyal fans. He felt the bag being removed, and he couldn’t help but dart his eyes around the room. He forgot he was here.
He was on a chair, tied in place, in a mostly dark room. The tiny amount of light that leaked him was enough to make him wince.
He forgot...
The bag was tossed ungracefully to the ground, the paper hitting the stone quietly. It fell from the hands of a man wearing a masquerade mask, concealing his face more than the darkness alone could have done. It didn’t look like he walked. It looked like he slithered.
“You're a long way from home,” the man said, “Tramilton Lougferd.”