Chapter Text
First light has only just begun to spill through the busted out window. It casts beams through moth-eaten holes and cigarette burns on the stained and musty blanket that's nailed to cover up the draft. The dredges of sleep still haven’t left your system. Lazily, you blink your eyes a few times but let them close once more when you decide it’s not going to hurt anyone if you sleep in for a few more hours.
Dreams come rushing over your eyes, sweet whispers and bird song and smoke and the sound of tires screeching against pavement. Your eyelids rush to rise, held open as if someone had glued them that way. Your senses surrender to your ears as you listen in silence. An engine revving, voices, talking, laughing. Who the hell is here? You’re just getting up onto your feet when someone begins to pound on your door.
You stand there paralyzed at first. Knocking on people’s doors here on Pandora isn’t a very common thing. Especially when you tend to live in the middle of nowhere. You take a step forward and then another. You wonder if you should chance a gaze past the blanket-turned-curtain. But before you can do anymore than that, something is tossed in through that same broken window you’d only seconds ago decided against looking out.
Your eyes draw to what's been thrown in. And your heart stops. It sputters. Your mind is reeling. It's some sort of canister that you wholeheartedly expect to explode. But a blast never comes. Instead, billows of smoke rise up to suffocate the tiny room. One half gasp of the fog sends your lungs into a frenzy of coughs. You're choking on your last breath. You’re wheezing, the blood has risen to your face, your knees buckle. You can’t even hold your own weight.
You drop to the floor with one hand clawing desperately at your throat as if that might make you breathe again. Your other hand is rubbing your eyes in desperation as the smog seems to coat your eyes in a maddening itch, but nothing helps.
You gasp, you heave, your vision becomes blurry with hot and messy tears that run down your cheeks without so much as your permission. A darkness begins to strangle the edges of your sight. Everything grows more fuzzy and it's from more than just your tears.
With one more hopeless inhale and that there isn't any oxygen to reach your lungs, you shlump forward, crashing to the floor. You can hardly manage to even turn your face before you land. You can barely move.
You try to make your hand work in any way at all, to just move it. Because you can still see it even if only just with your dwindling vision but your fingers only twitch. And no matter that you're trying to to move them with the ferocity of a tiger that's been cornered, they grow still. Your whole body does really but what you notice is the grave unmoving in your fingers since that's where your sight is held.
The anti of vision clouds your eyes, hazing the last flecks of refracted light so that you see nothing. Just the void. Blankness. Stillness. A too deep quiet. Like you're falling down a never-ending tunnel with your hair whipping all against your cheeks.
"For Tyreen!" It's the last thing you hear before your consciousness decidedly cuts. Stirring you in that last second before the pure nothing, not dreams or even nightmares, but a forced oblivion of stolen time. But you wonder if you really heard someone say your name before you lost consciousness or if it had been from somewhere inside of your head. Or was it a thought?
***
Something's rattling. Like metal clattering against metal but it's all around you. And the world is moving. Not in circles or anything like that. But it's as if you're on a magic carpet except the sky has ten million cracks and potholes and is actually quite a bumpy ride. And as your mind is still in that place that isn't exactly reality while also still being a far cry from the subconscious mind that leaves you unaware in your sleep, you first think about how disappointed you are that the sky is bumpy. Flying shouldn't be so rocky as this. If you wanted a rocky ride you'd drive a vehicle over — some rocks.
Your eyes fly open with the force of an explosion, you sit more upright though it seems you were already slumped into a seated position. The sky isn't bumpy. The road is. With a Bandit Technical swaying and drifting a little too close to railings and cliff edges. And you? As you study yourself and your surroundings, well, first there's panic. That's quickly followed by the dread though. So strong is your nausea you feel like you might be sick. But if you do get sick you'll only be torturing yourself since it would only get on you in such a tiny and enclosed space.
And when you bring your hand up to see if you can even reach the padlock that's keeping you locked in this kennel, you realize you can only poke your fingers out through the gaps between thin wire bars. You don't think you're going to manage messing with this lock any time soon.
"Queen Tyreen is going to love her," it's a marauder talking. You can sort of see him from the mirror.
"What i-if she hates it? What if she hates us and the god queen s-smites us? Maybe we should just set her on fire and throw her off the cliff, at least it'll be a pretty sight," and even though you can't see him, you're sure the rough and erratic voice is that of a psycho all hopped up on drugs.
"We can't go without a gift," the marauder answers, and then his eyes gaze into his mirror and you meet his gaze there for a second and quickly you try to go back to looking passed out, but it's already too late.
"Well, well, well, finally awake I see," the marauder says even though that line is like an overused trope at this point.
"Ooh, ooh, really?!" The other person is definitely a psycho as he suddenly turns around and half-stands in his seat to peer over the backrest to where your kennel is tied down and secured to the vehicle.
"At least she's a pretty one," the psycho insists.
"It doesn't matter if she's pretty, it's her name that matters," the marauder answers.
And suddenly it all comes together like pieces of a puzzle fitting together in your mind's eye.
They're COV. And they're taking you to Tyreen. COV Tyreen. Your heart practically stops. It's been the worst thing since the Calypso's had gained notoriety. Because though you're not a Calypso, you are named Tyreen, and while having no relation to the COV than that, it's still brought you misfortune. But this is the first time you've been kidnapped because of it.