Work Text:
It's dark.
That's the first thing you notice when you open your eyes. The second is how sore and cramped your limbs are. You try to stretch out but there's no room. It's as if the walls around you are encasing you in a box. A black, musty-smelling (third), box. Most people would be panicking right about now, scratching and clawing at the lid to gain any escape while shouting at the top of their lungs.
But you're not like most people.
Instead, you're thinking that whatever you're in could be cozy. Sure it has a scent to it but with time it could become comforting or maybe because of all the years of painkiller abuse and the multiple knocks to the head you experience everything in slow motion. Maybe you are terrified right now but that sensation hasn't registered to your brain yet so you're waiting for something to click and send you into the expected panic. You sit there and wait for the emotion to make its grand appearance but after what feels like a minute the only thing you're feeling are your joints radiating with pain from being folded in for so long. If you could you'd shrug your shoulders. You shimmy yourself onto your back, place your feet and hands on the lid of your entrapment, and push up.
Your surroundings are a god-awful bubblegum pink color that reeks of rotten trash and paint.
You wrinkle your nose as the scent intrudes and makes your nostrils its home. You're inside a room. It looks like your standard room with a bed, all your keyboards scattered about, some sort of portable musical machine, your old computer, and a circular window but something seems off. You crawl onto the bed, look out the window, and see... Nothing. It's an empty vastness before you. You're about to turn away but you squint your eyes to peer into the distance. Something is approaching quickly and not just that; it's getting bigger with each passing second. As it becomes more visible you feel your heart start racing and the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.
There is that terrified feeling.
You let out a yelp as you scramble back from the window, your hand missing the edge of the bed and causing you to tumble off backward. As you quickly crawl backward to get as far away from the window as possible you bump into a wall and all you can think to do is nervously tap your fingertips together as you try to make yourself as small as possible. A giant eye is staring back at you. You know that the eye belongs to a whale. It's as if the whale is glaring at you as it continues to stare at you before you see its body take over the window, soon swimming away and disappearing just as fast as it showed up. Even after the whale has left you can still feel your heart racing a mile a minute. You look around and realize how tiny the room is and notice more of your belongings inside, like a heap of your clothes in one corner and your Spiderman cutout in another. You're trying to make sense of how you got here when you hear the knob of the door click and the door opening. You look towards it and you feel your blood turn to ice.
"Murdoc," you catch yourself saying.
Murdoc rolls his eyes, "Yeah it's me. I'm sure you thought I was dead but no. I am here in the flesh before you. Now close your mouth, get your arse up, and meet me upstairs. We have work to do."
You watch Murdoc turn and leave. You didn't think he had died but you wished he did. It was what he deserved after you watched Noodle plummet to her death. In fact, death would be too kind for him. He deserved to rot.
But he's here in an unknown building with you and you can't escape because there's a whale outside. You are trapped.
You take a deep breath, exhale, and hope that all the nerves will breathe out of you (they don't but it's now mild nerves). You stand up, take one last look towards the circular window, and walk out of the room.
You have no idea what's in store for you.