Chapter Text
The flash of a camera awakens you; singes through your eyelids and forces you to wince your eyes open, one hazy blink at a time.
"Morning, sweetheart."
You don't know that voice. Its low purr, coarse with anticipation.
Mind swollen in your skull, you strain to blink up at the shape of it, the shape of that voice, the shape of its master. Colors reeling across your vision.
That shape, that someone, is peering down at you - and yet, somehow, that seems all wrong, like the world’s been turned upside-down and left you right-side behind it. Black and white outlines swirl like a slog, a halo of fluorescent light glowing around it; a crown of light upon that swirling, peering face that churns and distorts and slowly coagulates. Inhuman features looking down at you with a slight little head tilt. So inquisitive.
It feels like your heart’s cradled in your head, throbbing against your temples, and it’s making it so hard to think. Yet you struggle to ascertain exactly where you are, of why your whole body aches, of why the world feels so distorted.
It’s the heavy crackle of chain that draws your frazzled gaze away from that face slowly forming over you, as instead you stare up toward your feet - and immediate spears of apprehension stab through your middle, wriggling through your muddied stupor. For you see above you the length of your entire body, stripped down to nothing but your bra and underwear. Your ankles bound tightly together with some kind of black cord, the binds of which hang from a rusted hook affixed to a short chain on the ceiling.
You’re upside-down - that’s why your world is spinning - the realization strikes you like the current of an icy, unforgiving stream.
You’re upside-down - hanging there from one of many metal hooks, all in a charming little row, scattered across the ceiling; though yours seems to be the only one with a person bound and dangling from it.
Through your wooziness, panicked instinct has you at once struggling to free yourself, the grind of metal singing out over your shallow groans, nerves and pain wracking over you. Without the ability to hold onto your thoughts, you try to reach up and somehow claw through those cords tying your ankles together, despite how your muscles tremble with protest - only to find that your wrists and elbows are tied together with the same sort of cord, bound behind your back as you sway several feet above the stained and littered floor.
Tearing your attention away from how you weakly twist against your bonds, your alarmed, whirling gaze rises once more to the person standing right in front of you, their proximity far too close for comfort. Watching you from above as your head sways weakly before their waist. And as you stare, their face burns more and more into focus through your befuddled fog. Though, as its colors take shape, at first you think you must be seeing things. For it’s a white, ghostlike face that stares down at you. Its mouth torn into a never-ending scream.
It’s almost like that ghost knows your gaze is slowly sharpening on him, enough to finally see the full horror of his mask - because he’s definitely wearing a mask, though your mind is raked by pain in trying to figure out why. A man in a ghost-faced mask. And he lifts a black leathered hand to give you a little wave, ‘hello’, fingers rolling pinky to fore.
"Look who finally decided to wake up," that voice of his teases from behind his veil of white plastic, far too chipper for how panicked you are. "I was starting to think you were just gonna hang around all day."
You want to say something. You try to say something. But your tongue feels as swollen as your head, and your mind is spinning with all the warning bells ringing through it. Warning bells that scream more and more in relentless declaration that there’s someone in a ghost mask staring down at you, making fucking small talk while you’re tied upside-fucking-down to a fucking meat-hook or something in who-the-fucking-fuck knows where and oh my god, oh-my-god what’s happening?
“I gotta admit,” the ghost man muses, almost to himself, while you’re left to strangle over why the hell he isn’t helping you, why he seems so calm about all this. “I didn’t think you’d be unconscious this long.” Above your bafflement, he gives a listless little shrug - broad shoulders stretched against black leather. Adding a bit… flirtatiously, to your rising alarum, "Maybe my tranqs and I came on a little strong. But can you blame us? We’re infatuated. And you looked so cute tied up like this, mumbling incoherently like some nightmarish mirage in your sleep.”
One gloved finger rakes a line down the length of you, stroking navel to neck. Fingertip skipping across the center-band of your bra as his touch passes languidly between your breasts. “You put on quite a show…” he gently purrs. “I couldn’t bear to wake you."
You can’t help from gasping as he grabs your hips in his hands, standing so close your nose brushes against his upper thigh for a moment. Digging his gloved fingers into you, testing the plushy give of your curves. “Were you dreaming about me, sugarbear?” he wonders with subtle glee. “Ah, this’ll be such a cute story to tell the kiddos one day.”
Groaning low in your throat, still struggling to string any form of coherence together, you attempt to wriggle away from him again, to somehow slip through his grasp. But with how weak you are, you merely flounder in his iron grip. Tied, strung, disoriented.
You aren’t going anywhere.
He chuckles, like the attempt at even thinking you could flee him’s adorable. His black-leathered fingers rapping delicately along the outsides of your hips as he holds you, with him crooning sweet and venomous, "I wouldn’t want to steal away dreams of me.”
Thap-thap-thap-thap, his fingertips dot along your sides, drumming in speculation. A certain eagerness to the way he trails his touch over you.
“But now that you’re awake…”
You can’t stifle a shriek as he roughly seizes your jaw without warning - his grip far from gentle, forcing your face up further toward his, until his mask is all you dare to see. Your head is pounding, overfilled with blood, and he cackles like a boyish imp as your startled outburst dies behind your teeth.
His other hand slips off your waist, and there’s a thick sound of fabric shuffling somewhere near your head before a metallic flash in your periphery makes your eyes widen, with you realizing far too late he’s got a hunting knife angled toward you in one fist. And before you can scream he’s brought the steel of it beneath the delicate curve of your jaw, pressing its edge in just enough to ease you into a nice little slice, the bite of it catching your shriek as your breath hitches sharply.
The bastard hums at the sound of you sucking back pain, like you’re music to his ears. Like he’s an avid admirer at the goddamn opera. Swiping up a ribbon of crimson warmth trickling up along the cusp of your neck, pulled up by gravity until it trickles along the swell of one cheek, nearly catching in your lashes as it weaves into the hair at your temple. And with his index finger painted red, he presses it to your lips to shush those sounds he so seems to enjoy.
“No screaming,” he says behind his screaming mask.
A few huffs of mirth titter out of him at whatever terror wields your expression, with him tacking on a helpful, “Well, at least no screaming yet.” Your vision strains against the light behind him as his finger drags across your mouth, rough against your softness. “It’ll spoil the fun for all that screaming you’re gonna do later.”
If any part of you doubted that this guy, this absolute psychopath, was the cause of your capture - the reason you were tied and strung upside-down like a slab of fucking meat - it was forcibly stripped from you then. And somewhere past the dread seizing your mind, sinking its claws into your spine, you at last find your voice, managing to sputter up at him, "Wh-who… who are you..?"
You’d somehow expected him to taunt you. But his predatory silence is his only reply. And you’re left to stare owlishly, to drown in the details of him. Built muscularly lithe, dense shoulders and tapered waist, dressed all in black, every inch of him plastered in it - from cowled, hooded head to combat-booted feet.
All except his mask.
His stark, chasm-eyed, ceaselessly screaming mask. Staring right down at you. The voids of his darkened gaze searing into your soul.
You can’t look away, trapped within their burning blackness. And even though you can’t see his face, you somehow can’t shake the horrid, creeping feeling that he’s smiling while he watches you.
Your vision catches once more on the flash of his knife, still fisted in one dark-leathered hand beside his waist, and a pathetic whimper dies out in your throat.
This psycho’s going to fucking kill me…!
“What do you w-want from me?!” you shrilly clamor past your tightening throat, adrenaline and fear pumping heavy through your veins; enough so that you can’t help from trying to twist away from him again, to escape before he once more decides to bring his blade against your skin. Though for all your writhing desperation, you simply sway in place like a pendulum. Helplessly, frantically wriggling; gasping with every twist against your bonds.
No, you’re not going anywhere.
Not unless he wants you to.
Whoever the hell he is, he still doesn’t answer. Though his rough hold slips from off your jaw so he can twist his blade betwixt his fingers as he watches you in veiled silence. Head tilting gently to one side, as if admiring the fear distorting your features, that slick of blood he’s smeared across your trembling lips. The shadowed artist and his trapped and tremulous painting.
“What don’t I want from you, sweet thing?” he says at length, lightly. Still twiddling his blade, toying the pressure of its tip upon his thumb. “It’s not so much about what I want, as much as it is in what order I want it. And lucky for you,” he reaches out to smear that drying blood along your lips with one thumb, his lungs seeming to shudder at the sight of you grimed arterial red for him, “I like to have all kinds of fun before breaking my toys."